Young children display geographical awareness from an early age, and a new report on early years mapping is rich with links to curriculum and ideas for activities, finds Meredith Jones Russell

The need to map our environment is primal – before pen and paper existed, our ancestors did it to note sources of food, water, shelter and danger.

‘Models of reality have always helped us make sense of our world, and maps are no exception,’ explains Paula Owens, teacher, consultant and visiting research fellow in geography at Canterbury Christ Church University. ‘We all need navigational skills. It's not enough to rely on a “Google mentality”. As news stories often show, people end up making dangerous decisions if they lack the ability to comprehend and read maps.

‘Maps hold, store and convey information. They help us recognise patterns in the landscape and compare the world at different scales. At a simple level, maps are about space, place and environment and scale.’

MAPS IN THE EYFS

The brain has a specialised region which navigates our spatial environment, and like any region of the brain, it can be developed by repetition – so maps are a great subject to introduce to young children. In her 2022 report Maps and Mapping in the Early Years (see further information), Dr Owens says children display geographical and environmental awareness from an early age, and can therefore enjoy and learn from maps as soon as they arrive at a nursery or pre-school setting.

Making and reading maps can provide an ideal way to build confidence and independence in navigating both familiar and new environments, express feelings about people and places, and tell stories about friendship, family and places.

‘Children can start interacting with maps as soon as they show an interest in books and toys. Play maps for cars, farm animals and figures are maps children play with from a very young age,’ Dr Owens says.

‘Children are expected to have a vast amount of spatial knowledge by the time they finish primary school, knowing, for example, the name and location of the continents and oceans by age seven and of many countries and significant global features by age 11. This means practice and familiarity are important, as well as encountering maps in different contexts to build confidence and fluency.’

While some research suggests that children have some early ability in engaging with maps and spatial thinking, teacher and author Dr Patrick Wiegand believes there is more evidence to suggest that map skill is acquired gradually. Dr Wiegand explains that maps are a form of ‘dual coding’, a way of embedding memories using both imagery and verbal associations. When maps and language are used in tandem, this is thought to enable a richer base for retaining and then recalling knowledge.

‘The key is practice, with support,’ says Dr Owens. ‘Playing in the sand, building Lego landscapes, chalking out islands on the school playground, making 3D junk landscapes or models of the local high street are all playful ways to engage with maps.’

Even something as simple as a regular walk in the local area can support knowledge and understanding about the world through language development, sensory reflections and spatial awareness, says Owens.

LINKING TO CURRICULUM

The Early Learning Goals mention the importance of maps for helping children learn to ‘describe their immediate environment’. And according to Dr Owens, mapping works across the Areas of Learning. ‘There is lots of resonance with mathematics, for example, particularly in the language of directionality and in thinking about relationality.’

Maps reinforce mathematical concepts such as recognising and comparing patterns, and understanding distance and scale. They can also unlock and reinforce new vocabulary about the world, and help to sequence events.

‘Maps are a great communication tool,’ Dr Owens says. ‘They are prompts for language and directional vocabulary, vital things for young children to grasp. Used in conjunction with the written and spoken word, they also help embed information into memory more easily.’

From a physical development perspective, maps stimulate exploration, develop co-ordination and positional awareness, act as prompts for different kinds of movements across a space, and spur children to get to know landscapes around them, while the process of making maps encourages fine motor control and hand-eye co-ordination, and ties into expressive arts and design.

RESOURCES

Dr Owens advocates introducing young children to a variety of different types of maps even at a young age. ‘Lots of play with globes is good, as a 3D map of the world is going to be more accurate than a 2D map,’ she says. ‘Nursery and Reception children can use a blow-up globe and identify areas of land and water, for example.’

Globes you can write on, Ordnance Survey maps of the local area at a large scale (i.e., 1:1250 or 1:2500), access to digital mapping with annotation, such as online resource Digimap for Schools, access to aerial imagery, especially of the school and local area, a range of prompts for creating maps, such as sand, water, storybooks or small-world play, and large-scale printed maps cut up and laminated to make simple jigsaws, are also recommended resources.

ACTIVITIES

Dr Owens recommends exploiting the unique opportunity in the early years to plan for both outdoor and indoor provision.

‘Research tells us that geographical vocabulary is learnt best through first-hand, real-world experiences,’ she explains. ‘Fieldwork is so good for learning, mental health and wellbeing, and cognitive development. It teaches children through first-hand experience how to safely navigate environments, how to notice and value the world around them, and develops vital vocabulary.’

Activities she suggests include:

  • Journey strings. Encourage children to collect items on a walk and tie them to a piece of string or stick in the order they are found to make a linear map of a walk and help children recall what they encountered.
  • A length of string can also be manipulated into the shape of a walk so children can draw a simple route and add drawings or photos of what they found, or actual objects such as leaves or sticks.
  • Chalks can be used to draw directions or islands in the playground.
  • Tabletop maps can be used for small-world play and with cars or Lego.
  • Traditional stories such as Little Red Riding Hood lend themselves to map-based retelling, using either a 3D modelled map or a 2D drawn map.
  • Introduce the idea of scale by creating a map of the setting or local area, either collaged or digital, and then ring and map a small part of it, noticing the detail and talking about zooming in and out.
  • Involve children in layout decisions, such as where they might want to locate a bird feeder. ‘Real problems that have meaning and relevance are especially useful and enjoyed by children because of their relevance and the opportunity to develop agency,’ says Dr Owens.

CASE STUDY: Clophill Pre-school, Bedfordshire

Story stones were linked with symbols from maps to help retell a familiar story or create a new one at Clophill.

‘We use story stones in two ways,’ says Imogen Godfrey, owner and manager. ‘One is with pictures of items and characters. The other is using codes from a map, like a castle symbol to show a site of interest. That makes a geographically mapped story, but they are always metaphorically mapped too, because you plot the journey from beginning to middle to end.’

As Clophill is an outdoor setting, staff are keen to refer to geographical terms like sunrise and sunset and use points of the compass as reference points, while regular trips out on ’Adventure Friday’ provide an opportunity for children to create maps of where they have been by sticking objects they find to a paper crown or wrapping them onto a stick with wool to help recount the story of their journey back at nursery.

Children make their own treasure maps as part of imaginary play, and retell stories such as We’re Going on a Bear Huntusing maps on which they have plotted the events of the book.

They have also been asked to have their say in an upcoming redesign of the setting's nature garden, choosing the location of the chicken pen and fruit tree area.

‘We will be asking the children to think about where things are placed,’ says Godfrey. ‘They will use maths to plot things, saying things like “that needs to go ten steps away in this direction”. That's the simplest way of mapping anything, so it's the best place to start.’

Practitioners are also helped by referencing maps, Godfrey says.

‘We talk a lot about the cognitive map of learning,’ she explains. ‘It's very important to us that children don't learn in a straight line, but learn everything that goes across and around a subject. One of the outcomes that was stripped out of the EYFS was about children making connections between different parts of their lives. But that's what learning is. It helps to build the bigger picture, give information, and solidify everything, so that's how we teach.’

She adds that provision maps are what staff use to plan support for children with SEND.

‘That may not be a map in the traditional sense, but it is still thinking about how to map out the process and the child.’

More literally, staff also refer to the map of the setting when making the most of the space available. ‘We use maps to assess in our own head how the setting is used, where the main areas are, where children are going, what they are using, and what isn't being used,’ Godfrey says. ‘That helps us understand both the workings of the space and the workings of the child.’

CASE STUDY: St Leonard's Primary School in Stafford

‘We always go out on walks in the local area, but in order to give a more geographical focus, we decided to look for specific landmarks that the children were interested in and wanted to talk about,’ explains EYFS leader James Gray. ‘They picked out things they might not have seen before, or things they knew about, like one child whose dad was a gas engineer, so he knew a lot about the gas boxes we saw.’

The Reception class, which is part of the Early Childhood Mathematics Group, then spent time back in class discussing the landmarks using photographs taken on the walk. Gray used six of these to create a simple map of the route, before taking the children on the walk again.

‘They were able to use positional language and find the landmarks to work out where they needed to go next,’ says Gray. ‘They did it so well, we decided to push it a bit further.’

This time, Gray created a new route, with different landmarks.

‘I made a really basic map which they needed to rely on to get to the end,’ he says. ‘An adult followed behind, but didn't intervene unless there was some kind of danger. So if they took the wrong route, or missed a landmark, we would allow them to carry on. The idea was they would work out where they had gone wrong, but we didn't actually have that issue as they all followed the map really well. They were perfectly independent.’

The activity helped children develop communication and social skills, Gray adds.

‘They were put in pairs, and managed to work together. In the classroom they might not have been so hot on negotiating and listening to each other, but because they were somewhere else and didn't know what to expect, they had no choice but to really listen to each other. It was really powerful in terms of teamwork.’

Back at the setting, staff used large sheets of paper for children to draw streets on for buildings in the block area. Children were then keen to map their own journeys to school, and present them to others in the class.

‘I certainly didn't think it would be a project that was going to take an enormous amount of time,’ admits Gray. ‘But the children got so engrossed that we just ran with it, and it went on for about half a term.

‘It showed there were so many different possibilities across all areas of learning. I’ve used maps to help with positional language in a mathematical context, but the whole spatial reasoning element of putting children into a 3D learning environment, getting them to orient themselves within an unknown space and translate the map in front of them into something meaningful, rather than just drive toy cars around a map on the floor, was amazing in terms of the skills they showed, and eye-opening to see what they were capable of.

‘We used a really simple map that showed a journey through the local area, but it missed out things the children didn't pass. A greater level of detail, and expecting them to pick things out on a more complex map, could be used for older children, and extended to look at different countries, explore biomes, compare countries and use technology like Google Maps and Digimap. Maps are such a powerful medium to work with.’

FURTHER RESOURCES

BOOKS

  • Henry's Map by David Elliot
  • We’re Going on a Bear Huntby Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury
  • Window by Jeanne Baker
  • Me on the Map by Joan Sweeney
  • Lucy in the City by Julie Dillemuth
  • My Map Book by Sara Fanelli
  • The Bear in the Cave by Michael Rosen and Adrian Reynolds
  • Oi! Get off our Train by John Burningham
  • Here We Are by Oliver Jeffers