Transparency Map Project

Our history curriculum comes with a wonderful set of maps to learn geography right along with history.  For rhetoric (high school) students they suggest using transparency overlays for the mapwork, rather than straight paper maps, and we chose to do this with our daughter G this past year.  It was something she really enjoyed, making geography more "artsy" for her, and therefore probably sticking better in her memory!

Here is a set of pictures showing how the transparency maps work.  These are from this past spring, as we learned about the Revolutionary War.  First she started with a base map that was printed onto cardstock.  It had boundary lines for the colonies already printed on it, as well as some geographical features such as mountains and major rivers.  She added nothing to this base map (sometimes the base maps are more sparse and I have her add a few features directly to the cardstock base map first).

This particular set of map overlays spanned two weeks.  The first week she did two overlays, and the second week just one.  The first overlay showed the northern, middle, and southern colonies (in different colors).

Later that week, the second overlay showed early battles of the Revolutionary War. Those won by the Americans are shown in blue, while those won by the British are shown in red.  Place names (of the battles) are also labeled.

The following week our daughter added this third overlay to show the later battles of the war.  She lined up all the info in the "key" so that no writing would be on top of the writing from a previous overlay (click on photos to see larger).

When looking at the whole thing, as long as the transparencies are lined up, it is not confusing at all, but a wonderful visual representation of dates, places, and battles that she learned about!

We have found that not all weeks lend themselves well to a transparency project; on those weeks our daughter does paper maps like everyone else.  But whenever possible (I do try to look ahead and plan for it) the transparency maps are a fun way for her to do map making!