Teaching with Maps

MTHS Lesson Plans

Last month, in a post on literacy and social studies, I reviewed why teaching social studies improves literacy and talked about the "Write Your Way In/Out" strategy. I also promised to share some other strategies for imbedding literacy activities into your social studies units.  

We recommend using maps in many lessons (including our study guide for Girl from the Gulches: The Story of Mary Ronan) and Lesson 2 of Unit 3 of Montana: A History of our Home) but here are two of my favorite map lessons:

·       Montana Today: A Geographical Study (designed for grades 4-6, but easily adaptable for higher grades) asks students to investigate how climate, geology, and geography affect the lives of Montanans. I particularly like Part 1, in which they construct population maps and look for patterns. An upper grade (grades 6-8) version of Part 1 is now available. A Google Docs version of the upper grade worksheets is also available.

·       Mapping Montana, A to Z, Lesson Plan (Designed for grades 4-8) is a perennial favorite that asks students to plan a trip across Montana, visiting towns that start with every letter of the alphabet. 

Cool Maps to Use in Your Classroom

Here's a really interesting map that shows the neighborhoods that were swallowed by the Berkeley Pit.

Here is an interesting article on how Mercator maps distort our understanding of countries' sizes and a tool to see the "True Size of Every County." 

The Library of Congress has digitized many of the Sanborn maps for Montana (and other states as well). What are Sanborn maps, you ask? Founded in 1867 by D. A. Sanborn, the Sanborn Map Company was the primary American publisher of fire insurance maps for nearly 100 years.” Their maps “include information such as the outline of each building, the size, shape and construction materials, heights, and function of structures, location of windows and doors. The maps also give street names, street and sidewalk widths, property boundaries, building use, and house and block numbers.” Here are a few ways teachers have used them: 

“Using pages from the Census, Sanborn maps and the local history book "Stumptown to Skitown" students explore what Whitefish was like 100 years ago.”
Using the Sanborn maps for Missoula, we re-constructed neighborhoods and created logs of the businesses and how they changed over time.

The Montana Authors Project has documented the settings in favorite Montana books from Tough Trip through Paradise and Fools Crow to A River Runs through It, This House of Sky, and Selected Poems of Richard Hugo in an interactive map. 

The State Historic Preservation Office has created several maps reflecting Montana history. My favorite is Montana in the Green Book.

Wondering how your county voted in 1914 on the question of women's suffrage? Find out.

Find more map resources and suggestions for how to use them in this old blog post.