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Exploring Writing, Social Studies, and Math in a Map Challenge

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Encouraging students to bring their creativity and imagination to challenging content makes it more accessible—and helps them learn it more deeply.

Each fifth grader in Andrea Ketcham’s class in Eminence, Kentucky, has been charged with creating a world and asking someone else to navigate it. In this interdisciplinary project, students use a range of skills—from spatial awareness and mapmaking to communication skills and coding. To touch on English Language Arts standards, students use descriptive language to write about their imaginary land. Next, to align with social studies standards, they’re tasked with drawing a map depicting it, complete with key features like grid points and a compass rose. When their maps are complete, the students come up with questions that challenge a classmate to identify characteristics of their land and program a Sphero BOLT robot (https://sphero.com/products/sphero-bolt) to follow directions and get to a specific destination. By the end, students have mastered content from multiple subject areas—and stayed engaged and excited through the whole process.

For more strategies on making learning more playful, visit: https://www.edutopia.org/making-learning-playful

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