Teaching Kids Art Through Picture Books
Literature based art ideas for you and your family
How to draw a map of an imaginary land
Map making is a great skill for kids to develop: As they learn about maps, they are growing:
- In spatial awareness
- Their understanding of their place in the world related to everything else
- Their ability to think in the abstractÂ
- Their creative abilities by imagining and drawing their own maps
- Their fine motor skills as they draw and color mapsÂ
It’s fun to draw maps of places kids are familiar with, like their bedrooms or their street. But it is also important to encourage kids to dream of faraway places they may have never seen and to be able to put those places down on paper. Your child might invent an imaginary place that no one except your child knows about. Your child may draw a treasure map and put lots of fun markers pointing the way.
One of my daughters loved her imaginary country of “Tearaki,” which she drew maps of and populated with her own characters and landmarks.Â
When you think about it, all authors who create fictional stories in fictional worlds must have a...
