Teacher's Guide

Procedure

Step One - Investigating Maps

Students analyze several different types of maps and begin to create a dictionary of cartographic and architectural terms and definitions.

Step Two - Investigating Community

Students analyze a historical map of their community and identify recognizable sites. They learn to differentiate between architectural styles and date the homes on their block and place their own homes in an historical context.

Step Three - Real Estate Advertising

Students connect with the original purpose of panoramic maps-attracting prospective residents, businesses, and investors to the town-as they look at their own homes through the eyes of potential buyers or renters. They examine real estate advertisements and create advertisements for their own homes.

Step Four - Creating Personal Maps

Students create a collage by drawing the homes and other structures on their blocks. After the blocks are completed and joined, students write letters to future children in their community explaining the mapping project.

Evaluation

Students will be assessed based on the contents of portfolios that include the following:

1. Personal dictionaries of architectural and cartographic terms - Rubric
2. Real estate ads - Rubric
3. Copies of collages representing the blocks where they live - Rubric
4. Letters to students in the year 2103 - Rubric

 

Extension

Students continue to draw grid sections of the contemporary map. Section by section, they gather data about structures erected since 1903. Students create drawings of those structures and affix them to the new map.

Further extension activities:

1. Students examine the panoramic photo of their town's main street from the American Memory collection Taking the Long View: Panoramic Photographs, 1851-1991. They identify buildings that are still standing and those that are not. In journals, they speculate on the activities of the people in the photo. They create their own contemporary panoramic photo of the same vista. Finally, they make a videotape of a student walking down the main street narrating what she or he sees compared with that in the turn of the century photo.
2. Students examine antique local postcards from the collection of a community member. They match the postcard images to buildings on the map. In their journals, they respond to the messages written by the senders of the postcards.
3. Students observe and respond in journals to photos of children from the American Memory collection, Touring Turn-of-the-Century America: Photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company, 1880-1920. Students compare and contrast photos of children from 1900-10 to those of today.
4. Students make PowerPoint presentations to a variety of audiences, explaining their work as cartographers.