Map Reading for little ones

It all started in a recent visit to a local Mall with my kids. My younger daughter is fond of picking up flyer and three folds wherever she goes. This time also she picked up the Guide booklet from malls entrance.

As always my mind could not settle on just letting her play with the flyer, so while our travel back home I gently took it from her. And I started thinking an alternate use of this to learn some concept.

Then it struck me ….. Here is a simple and wonderful tool to teach my daughter data analysis, map reading, classification& categorization.

So the first thing was to get her interested in our little fun learning game. So I began with “Find a Store”. The first one was “KFC”. I told her to look for KFC on map. Since we knew its on 2^nd floor, I made her run through 2^nd floor map. After scanning the map carefully she was able to figure out where KFC is on map.

 

 

Then we searched for “Time Zone” gaming area. Since it was on same floor and we had visited it in this trip. She could easily trace it by mind mapping the direction we had walked.

Then it was time for role reversal so she gave me names of few joints and I searched those in the map.

Once done with this, I asked to imagine a scenario where she will not know the floor on which a particular store is located. How will we use this map to search our store ?

 

 

So we went back to first page, where the stores’ listing was provided with categorization and color coding.

So query based learning started

• Where is “MOD” listed?
• Which other joints are listed in same category?
• What is common in these ?
• What all information can you get from this category table?
• Do you know why there is yellow color band for this category?

After done with this, we started looking for MOD using the information available in table. So “MOD” is on first floor and the area will be marked yellow.

We opened the first floor plan and started locating “MOD”. Got it.

This kind of exercise continued for a while with other stores and categories.

 

Then both of us got tired and decide to put it aside for some time.

Next on our agenda is letting her navigate me to stores in our next trip to this mall, using the guide/map.

Try this with your kid next time you visit a mall and see how much fun learning you can extract out of a simple leaflet, which would have otherwise gone in the dustbin.