Lesson Guide:
My School
Address

Project
Documents:
Wister
School Address

"I learned that the 4 streets around our school are Monroe, 4th, 5th and Fitzwater"
--Nadira Darboso, Meredith Elemtary School
 
Learning About the School's Area:
Fourth graders can tell you where they live. "What's my address?" will be met with "287 Monroe Street, Apartment 12," or the like. The same is true with phone numbers. These are the things parents have their kids learn for safety. But what do students know about their school address? Or why the school is there? Or what's near it? In short, what students tend to know about the context of the building where they spend so much of their time is very limited -- that's what teachers from the Rosenbach discovered when they did the "My School's Address" activity with their classes. Students had to find out where things were around the school. Which way does the front door face? On what side of the classroom does the sun rise? What stores are in the neighborhood? What about restaurants? And, for research, what was here twenty years ago? How about two hundred years ago, or two thousand? With the "My School's Address" activity, students collected this information both on neighborhood trips and for homework. Later, toward the end of the project, they came back to these sheets to see how much they had learned. On walks in the neighborhood, students had to focus carefully on details. They were encouraged to draw, photograph and notate what they saw. (More on this later in Street Drawing.)

Project
Documents:
Wister
Observation Game

Greenfield
Observation Game

"You had to have good eyes to catch all the details."
-- Jamie O'Connell, 4th grader, Greenfield School.

Exploring The Immediate Neighborhood:
To help students focus even more closely on their surroundings, Rosenbach teachers created an "Observation Game" for each neighborhood. Like a scavenger hunt, students set out to find the characteristic details of a nearby place. For students at the Greenfield School, it was Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Square. Orientation was all part of the game. "Walk to the middle of the Square. Face NORTH and look around," the sheet instructed them. Before setting out, they reviewed some of the orientation ideas discussed and explained that they would be moving beyond the classroom map and creating a neighborhood map. They also learned some new architectural vocabulary, like facade and finial. Then, out on the street in small groups they gathered like detectives. Getting everyone to slow down and observe carefully was the challenge, but they came back loaded with notes and drawings.

Lesson Guide:
How To Read
A Map

Learning The Language of Maps
Now that students had collected some information to communicate in a map, they needed to learn more about the language of maps. What story does a map tell? How do we understand it? What's the difference between a city, state, country and world map? What's a legend? What does scale mean? These are all components of the map's story, just as vocabulary and sentences tell the story of a book.

The mapping lessons began by presenting a variety of maps of Philadelphia, including historic maps from the Rosenbach Museum's collections. Since it's a gridded city with a north-south orientation, students could use the streets to find geographic directions. They could see the big intersection made by its main streets, Broad and Market, and then look for the school. The numbering system of the streets also helped out with locations. Some of the students talked about the routes they used to get to school and these were shown on the map. Our city spans two rivers, so students looked at what rivers they had crossed that morning. Then they looked at Pennsylvania maps, US Maps, and the world. This was a lot of distance to cover in an hour! Students than traveled back in time by looking at historic maps of Philadelphia. They were asked to find the site of the school on one of the Rosenbach's very old maps, and discovered farmlands and forests.

To read these maps, students needed to understand not only orientation but also the sophisticated use of symbols, map keys, legends, and scale. So teachers reviewed map reading and mapmaking skills as part of this lesson. This led to the next logical step -- making their first maps of the neighborhood (a section of it), this time not only with orientation, but map keys, scale, and detail.

"My favorite part of the community is Wister Playground. It's a park that has four swings, monkey bars, two big slides. It has about four basketball courts and a football field and also a baseball field. My community is special because it's a safe neighborhood. There are landmarks that you see everyday like Eddy's corner store at Wakefield and Bringhurst. My neighborhood is nice but I wish there was less litter sometimes."
--Darnell Grandy, 4th grader, Wister Elementary School

Making Individual Neighborhood Maps
As soon as they had all the information in hand, and after a review of mapping skills, students began work on their own maps of a small section of the neighborhood, using first pencil and then ink and watercolor pencil. They had to include street patterns, all of the details collected from the "Observation Game" activity, and, as in the classroom map, what was important to them. This was the "story" the map had to tell. Variety was the rule. The colorful results were informative and beautiful.