With the holidays quickly approaching, we wanted to share a Thanksgiving lesson idea early enough for you to implement it in your classroom. The link to the lesson we’re highlighting is for an elementary classroom – but use your imagination and think about a similar combination of GIS and creativity to create something age appropriate for your kids!

We ran across this tutorial for an elementary classroom and it captured our imagination. It shows you how to have your students paint or draw a map and had patterns for them to build their own ships (egg carton, playdoh, paper, etc – totally takes us back to childhood!).

What was intriguing was where you could take the project from there…You could easily create more complex maps online tracing trade routes, exploration voyages, etc. We know playdoh in the classroom works well at ANY age! Challenge older students to build their own unique ship of found objects to present with their maps.

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Click here for the full tutorial from Enchanted Learning: http://www.enchantedlearning.com/crafts/thanksgiving/map/