National Geographic’s traveling map of Europe will come to Oxford Elementary School to help students learn about the world around them.
The Giant Traveling Map will arrive in Oxford Thursday and spend two days on display for Oxford community members to visit.
The Mississippi Geographic Alliance, a National Geographic affiliate, organizes map tours throughout the state. Each state has its own Geographic Alliance, but not all states participate in the giant map program. To participate, the alliance pays for the maps and organizes the state tour.
Mississippi has only been a part of the map’s national tour for the last five years. This year, the map will spend time at nine Mississippi schools. It arrived in the state late last month in Long Beach and will make its final stop in Oxford this week.
The map of Europe is visiting Oxford schools on the tails of an “A” letter grade and 745 point score in the 2015-2016 Accountability Results. The Oxford School District was ranked first out of all Mississippi school districts in October 2016, based on performance, growth and graduation rate.
Mississippi has hosted each of National Geographic’s maps except for the Pacific Ocean and the Solar System recreations. This is the first time the European map has been to Mississippi.
Carly Lovorn, assistant director of the Mississippi Geographic Alliance, said she hopes the map will get students hooked on world history.
“In a lot of ways, it’s peaking students’ interest in a subject, in this case Europe, so the map has lots of activities on it,” Lovorn said. “Hopefully for a lot of students, they’re going to think, ‘This is really cool, and I want to learn more.’”
The learning map measures 26 feet wide and 26 feet long, and its activities are designed for students from kindergarten to eighth grade. Oxford Elementary invites non-students to come see the map in the gymnasium during Community Day on Thursday.
On Community Day, Oxonians can walk along the map to see where their ancestors are from, places they have been and learn about places they want to travel to in the future, Lovorn said.
“It covers a variety of physical and political geography,” Lovorn said. “They can learn about animals; they can learn about culture. A lot of times, if a teacher is teaching on a certain topic, we can do that, as well.”
Theresa Bates, local second grade gifted teacher, wrote the grant to bring the National Geographic Maps to the school. She said it is very important to broaden the children’s understanding of the world, and the map can do it in a fun yet educational way.
“The kids love seeing the huge maps,” Bates said. “They still remember walking in their socks all over the map.”
The map features versions of games like “Simon Says,” where students find geographical countries or areas on the map, and “All Aboard the Landmark Carousel,” which explores well-known European landmarks. In “The Grid Game,” students use latitude and longitude to find certain locations on the map.
To help older students learn, organizers can stack plastic cones to heights representing different cities’ populations on the map. Lovorn said this interactive learning helps information stick with the students more than simply looking at a table or graph can.
Lovorn said motivated teachers are a key to the map program’s local success.
“We bring the map and have people running activities,” Lovorn said. “But your organizing teacher has to get the schedule right so all the kids get to see it and do extensions in the classroom and takes really motivated partners.”
Bates said educators must continue to support social studies and geography in the classroom with real-world activities like these maps because it will help to develop the students’ understanding of the world they will inherit someday.
National Geographic sponsors traveling map programs for each continent and recently added a map of the solar system to its repertoire. Lovorn said the map program began with a traveling map of Asia.
“We just had it in Jackson at the Natural Science Museum; that’s one of our partners, and it was a big hit,” she said. “We invited some teachers to come see it and if they might like it. The next year we decided to try a few different places, and it just sort of ballooned from there to the whole state.”
