On Dec. 1, Peaks Island Elementary School celebrated the end of a semester-long mapping unit with an evening exhibition of student work.
Teachers Wendy Litchfield and Roberta Deane designed a creative mapping unit for their third, fourth, and fifth grade students last fall. The goal was to increase students’ knowledge of Peaks Island’s natural environment and to give them a deeper understanding of their community. Using geography and cartography as a springboard to wider learning, students
explored the art, science, and social studies of mapping their island.
Throughout the semester, the class benefited from the expertise of guest speakers from Map Adventures, the Greater Portland Council of Governments and the Island Institute. Additionally, the class received funds from the Portland Partnership Grants for Island Artists to work with local artists.
Students built a foundation of cartographic knowledge through class work on map interpretation and through several technical projects. Projects included using GPS units to find the exact latitude and longitude for several points of interest on the island: the Winnie the Pooh tree, Sam’s house, Jesse’s house. Using GPS units, the students wrote down the latitude and longitude of each of these positions, then entered that data into a GIS (Geographic Information Systems) software package to create a digital map of the three locations.
Each student also converted contour maps of Pumpkin Knob, a small island just north of Peaks Island, into a three-dimensional cardboard model, using cardboard layers to represent each ten-foot rise in elevation. Students were able to use traditional surveying equipment to measure and map the gardens at the Maine Historical Society as part of a field trip to the Center for Maine History.
Students’ work was not limited to traditional mapping. At the Maine Historical Society, students were able to explore historic maps of Maine and began to “see maps as tools and historical representations of life, not just factual documents,” said teacher Roberta Deane.
The class received funds from the Portland Partnership Grants program to work with local artists, Lane Williamson and Jeanne Hayman, and the class was also able to visit the Portland Museum of Art twice; once for the museum’s exhibit of “Mapping Maine – Four Contemporary Views” and once for a workshop based on Maine artist Thomas Crotty’s work.
In one of their artistic projects, students created elaborate three-dimensional islands of their own imagination, which were accompanied by write-ups detailing the history of the island as well as its physical geography and economic and political structure. A few examples: the Throroughbred Islands, the Taffy Islands and Isthmus Island.
These arts-based lessons allowed students to expand upon their technical knowledge of mapping and explore the various representational and artistic forms of map-making.
At the Portland Museum of Art, students divided an eight-foot-square outline of Peaks Island into 24 sections that they painted individually and then reassembled. Other arts-related projects included mapping the students’ paths from home to school and painting the Peaks Island landscape, all of which encouraged students to use their artistic skills in representing their environment.
The unit culminated with the creation of a large three-dimensional model of Peaks Island in 2028. For this project, artist Lane Williamson instructed students to envision Peaks Island in the future. Four groups of students broke the island into four pieces, which they painted and sculpted according to their vision for the future. The results were spectacular, including (but not limited to) an amusement park, solar electricity panels, and the site of a meteor impact. Independently, each of the four groups of students decided that they wanted to reduce tourism, secede from Portland, increase sustainable energy use, and increase community services for residents.
To view more photographs and information on student work from this unit, please visit the following site and click on the “Projects and Student Work” link on the left hand side of the screen: www.islandinstitute.org/education.asp.