ABSTRACT
This phase contains perhaps the greatest range of children’s development and most opportunities for promoting understanding of maps yet much map related teaching is still likely to be by non-specialist teachers. Activities in this phase are characterised by increasing abstraction in children’s use of language and their developing ability to describe patterns, generalise and classify as well as gradually being able to adopt other perspectives. Activities will still be rooted in practical tasks in relation to the immediate environment (such as making increasingly accurate measurements and comparing distances) but there will be a shift in scale to encompass the wider locality. As children’s knowledge of their home area expands so will their use of maps at scales of, for example 1:25,000 and 1:50,000. Parents continue to play a key role in providing for their children first hand experience of a widening area based on home as well as helping them interpret its representation in map form. Key resources in this phase include maps and plans of theme parks and shopping centres, maps on postcards and maps of the school catchment area and the home region. Three-dimensional support for learning in the form of models and plastic moulded relief maps will still be necessary. Children’s awareness of the wider world expands rapidly during this phase and they also encounter small scale maps (at country and continent scale) and make increasing use of atlases. Although most maps made by children are likely to be in hard copy, they should increasingly be able to use simple electronic tools with digital maps. Children also develop in this phase a beginning sense of the social purposes of maps. They understand that maps are particularly important for some groups of people (such as lorry drivers, estate agents and travel agents), that the maps themselves will vary according to the users’ needs and that the information shown on maps is selective. They understand that maps generally show permanent features (such as roads, buildings and woodland), not ephemeral ones (such as smoke, people and parked cars).
