If you’re in Ohio and you’re driving to Texas, what direction are you traveling?
 |
| Build map skills with easy to make overlays from transparency film! |
Sounds easy enough, right? Right? Hello?
Map skills and map directions never really go away; the skills just keep building year after year. Students need a solid foundation to build on, or they remain confused.
So, here is the question again. If you’re in Ohio and you’re driving to Texas, what direction are you traveling?
If your students are like mine, they often struggle with questions like this. I’ve found a simple, easy to implement strategy for building this integral map skill. We’ve has been working with cardinal and intermediate directions lately during social studies.
After studying directions and then spiraling back to it over the last couple of weeks, I noticed that my strugglers were still struggling with directions. The concept was just too abstract. They confused the starting position with the ending position and became confused.
So I made my struggling students a transparent compass rose. How? Easy!
 |
| Easy to make overlays to build foundational map skills |
Easy-to-Make Overlay
To make this overlay, you need transparency film, a permanent marker, a hole punch, and scissors.
I lightly bent my transparency film into four equal parts. (Yes, it’s hard to bend the transparency film, and yes, you can use a ruler instead!) Try to bend the transparency film so lightly that you won’t leave creases.
 |
| Make an overlay to differentiate for students struggling to understand directions |
 |
| Use overlays to build map skills! |
Differentiate Map Skills With Ease!
 |
| Easy differentiation for struggling students |
My Shameless Plug~
 |
| Creative Map Skills Project! |
What adaptations for map skills have you tried? What works and what doesn’t? I’d love for you to share some thoughts below in the comments!
