Mapping My Day

Follow Flora and her zany family as she takes us through her day with a series of vibrant and interactive maps. In our current GPS-ruled world, map-reading is something of a dying art. But learning to read, understand, and draw maps is a fun and active way for children to develop spatial thinking skills— how we think about and understand the world around us and use concepts of space for problem solving. Early exposure to maps concepts can help foster this type of cognitive development in children and boost their math and science learning as they progress through school. Each hand-drawn, kid-friendly map highlights key map concepts in the context of a story or puzzle. Figure out which route to school is the fastest, how to find Flora’s buried treasure, and even how to complete a dog agility course! Includes a Note to Parents, Caregivers, and Professionals with more information about maps and spatial concepts, as well as questions, games, and activities designed to encourage children to map their own days! From the Note to Parents, Caregivers, and Professionals: For readers of all ages, the three goals of this book are to: 1) show readers that maps can convey many types of information. Maps can tell all sorts of stories, sometimes more easily than with words. 2) inspire kids to draw their own maps and diagrams. Drawing spatial relationships is an excellent way to develop this spatial skill, and understanding spatial relationships is important for many aspects of life, including math and science learning. 3) introduce basic map concepts and vocabulary, and demonstrate why they are important. Each map in the story highlights just one or two map concepts at a time (compass rose, scale bar, legend, etc.), which are necessary for understanding that particular map.