One of my favorite things to teach in early elementary is map skills. There’s just something so special about helping students understand where they live and how they fit into the bigger world. And with the right activities, it’s easy to make these lessons hands-on, engaging, and memorable.
If you’re looking for fun and simple ways to teach map skills in kindergarten or first grade, here are a few resources I love using together.
Me on the Map Flip Book Activities
If you haven’t read Me on the Map by Joan Sweeney with your students, you have to try it! It’s the perfect book to kick off a unit on maps and geography.
After reading, I have my students work on the Me on the Map Flip Book. Each page focuses on a different “layer”, starting with themselves and zooming out to their street, city, state, country, and continent. The kids love adding their own drawings, and it’s such a great visual for showing how all the pieces fit together.
Map Skills: Me on the Map
Once they’ve got the basics down, I like to bring in the Map Skills: Me on the Map resource. It’s packed with activities to practice things like using a compass rose, understanding map symbols, and talking about different types of maps. These lessons really help students start seeing maps as tools they can use, not just pictures.
Kindergarten Social Studies Units Bundle
If you want to go all-in, the Kindergarten Social Studies Units Curriculum bundle is amazing. It covers a full year of lessons, so you can easily fit your map skills unit into a bigger plan that includes geography, communities, history, and more. It’s a total time-saver because everything is ready to go.
How I Put It All Together
Here’s how I like to teach it:
- Read aloud Me on the Map to introduce the concept.
- Make the flip book so students can personalize their learning.
- Add in map skills activities to deepen their understanding.
- Connect it to other social studies units using the yearlong bundle.
It’s simple, fun, and your students will walk away actually understanding where they are in the world…and loving it!
If you’re looking for more social studies activities and ideas, check out my post here!
