Reasoning with Maps

Some ideas on lesson plans where students learn to use maps for reasoning and decision-making.

• Students annotate a map to explain why the two houses differ in price. Hopefully the students should suggest that house prices are a symptom of social/economic and environmental inequalities.
• Students identify the boundary of ‘their area’ by annotating a map of their place in their neighbourhood. They identify places that are important to them.
• Students interpret and label maps to identify a city’s morphology (e.g., Athens, Romoe, Paris etc.) – street patterns, building density, infrastructure – and use this when trying to answer the question, ‘Why do house prices differ?’
• Students look at their local area on the map and then they are told to look at another area on the map to identify similarities and differences between two regions/ neighbourhoods/ districts.
• Students use the map to perform an “environmental” survey and use this to answer the question, ‘Does location affect environmental quality and thus house prices?’
• Students describe their own living environments based on the information provided by the map and highlight good and bad points.
• Students are first asked to map their area. They are then given a map of their area to revise their own initial map. They provide explanations on the spotted differences/similarities.
• Students see two maps of their region; one contempoary and one of the past (20-30 years before present day). They are asked to identify the areas of major change and provide potential reasons for this.
• To illustrate housing pressure, students map where their parents and grandparents lived
  before moving to where they leave now. They compare these changes/movements with those of their piers. A flow map of the classmates’ families “migration” can be drawn. They are asked to reason why generations had to change their home locations during the years.
• The students are asked to match a variety of housing designs to a variety of locations and to justify their choices using map evidence.