To know maps: Primary school children and contextualised map learning

Resumo

Maps are inherent in younger children’s lives, implicitly and formally. Their experiences in their immediate and local places from their earliest years enable children actively to construct their personal geographies, drawing on their everyday observations, journeys, explorations and activities. Place exploration and knowledge foster their spatial awareness, capability and decisions and enable their mental mapping of their known places and imagining of other places real and invented. Their personal geographical learning is essential in developing children’s meaning and understanding of formal maps. Primary geography best develops children’s map skills through extending their awareness and knowledge of places from the immediate and local to national and global using maps at all scales at all ages. From their early years children should engage with plans and large scale maps, and with globes and world maps, and begin to learn about and use atlases. Children’s progression in learning maps skills is accretive and varies; it interplays with their personal geographies. From this can be provided a sequence for learning across children’s developing environmental map abilities and their map reading capabilities. Geography provides the opportunities for their contextual learning of map knowledge, use and understanding.