Classroom Travel Map Curriculum and Vacation-Sharing Poster Projects

Old maps and atlas pages make wonderful classroom posters and can be used for recycling project themes as well. Put old maps to good use documenting student summer-vacation memories, as an ice-breaker project the first week of school, and classroom decorations for open-house.

Classroom Summer-Vacation Poster

As an ice-breaker activity for the first week of school, have your students help you create a summer-vacation poster to display at open-house. Ask your children to bring only one picture from summer, whether a trip to the local lake or a summer road-trip.

Make copies of these photos and return originals to their rightful owners. Using several old atlas-map pages, arranged whimsically around a white poster board; glue down and use as a modern-art backdrop, to highlight student vacation pictures.

Travel Curriculum

Your classroom poster can turn into exciting travel curriculum, as students share summer trips with the rest of the class. Allow this activity to lead into resident-state studies or a global curriculum theme.

Try cutting out recognizable state shapes from old maps such as California, Florida, Massachusetts, Texas, or the individual states within your curriculum. You may be able to pick up state-shaped stencils from your local craft store, or draw your own on thin cardboard, to trace around. Cut from atlas maps and glue down for individual state posters.

Classroom Recycle Projects

The recycled maps can also be turned into travel-book covers, as a classroom project. By positioning an open book over a road map, cut, fold and tape, to create snug book flaps (front and back) for holding homework, while protecting school books.

Matching desk-top pencil holders can become part of your travel curriculum theme, while providing projects to keep little hands busy. Utilizing sterilized vegetable or fruit cans and old map pages, trim and glue maps around the can, for travel-theme pencil/crayon holders.

Reading Chart Road Map

To provide classroom reading incentives, use map pages to cover a poster board, and create a reading-chart road map. Each child could have a white car (cut from card stock) with their name or pictures attached, and watch them race the other children, across the reading map.

This will help you and your students monitor individual progress-at-a-glance, as compared to the rest of the class. This will also enable children to stay on-track as they move their cars along pre-determined reading-road mileage, racing to the finish line.

Most of these projects will allow you to identify those students who need to be working with their hands, in order to focus, while listening and learning. If your curriculum contains elements of arts and crafting, along with names and pictures attached, they will learn-by-doing, retain more information, and achieve better test scores.