One day in our free play room we realized the children were playing a game involving Ninjas and maps. The Ninjas were using maps to "find the bad guys".
Because we have been exploring connection and movement we saw this as an opportunity to take those concepts to another level. As we already discovered children love things that move; planes, trains and of course cars. We posed the question, "If cars move, where are they going and how do we know how to get there?"
Their first maps were simple. We noticed that two different maps were being drawn. Arlo's map showed how to get somewhere, (to the treasure) and Maya's map showed where things are.
This led us to a class discussion about maps.
We read books depicting the various kinds of maps and waited to see where our new interest in maps might take us.