5 Fun Map and Globe Activities for Kids in the Classroom

Have you ever wondered how you can help your pupils in understanding where they are in the world? A fantastic method for capturing students' interest in places, directions, and how the Earth works is to teach them maps and globes. These early geography lessons help kids develop lifelong skills like direction, space, and awareness of their surroundings.

Young children can better understand their environment by learning to read a map or examine a globe. It teaches kids how to recognize landmarks, follow instructions, and realize that the Earth is larger than what they see on a daily basis. Students start to recognize links between their home, their country, and the world through hands-on visual learning.
There are many ways to make learning geography fun and meaningful, whether you're a homeschooling parent or a classroom teacher. As you’re reading this educational blog, you can use these strategies with your younger kids in the classroom.

5 Interactive Map And Globe Activities

Understanding map coordinates and globe skills establishes the foundation for spatial awareness, navigation, and interest about different places. However, these abstract concepts must be transformed into relatable and engaging experiences for young students.

Teaching globes and maps can be an enjoyable and imaginative experience for teachers. With the right activities, geography becomes an adventure of discovery rather than just memorizing places.

Here are a few easy, interesting teaching strategies to assist your pupils improve their mapping abilities.

1. Treasure Map Hunt

Create a little adventure zone in your classroom! Give your children simple map with hints or basic coordinates to locate small "treasures" like stickers, erasers, or tokens hidden throughout the room.

Students can also make their own treasure maps to solve for their classmates. This is an excellent method to maintain the adventure while reinforcing understanding!

Pro-Tip: Before beginning, go over basic map elements such as grid coordinates, landmarks, and the compass rose. You can add an exciting theme to your treasure maps, such as astronauts charting planets in space, explorers discovering natural landmarks, or pirates searching for hidden treasure.

2. My Neighborhood Map

Allowing pupils to draw a map of their own area will make geography more understandable! Start by asking them to consider what they see when they go outdoors, such as streets, homes, parks, shops, or even their favorite restaurant. Remind them to include landmarks that are meaningful to them, and remind them that every map tells a story of a place they hold special value for them.

This might even be turned into an entertaining "show and tell" in which each kid describes their drawing and what makes their neighborhood special.

Pro-Tip: Before you start the exercise, provide a basic sample map, such as one from Google Maps, and talk about how buildings, roads, and parks are represented by symbols. Encourage pupils to use color codes or pictures to make their own map legends.

3. Globe Exploration Time

Use a globe to give your pupils some hands-on experience. Let's be honest. Nothing beats the thrill of spinning it and discovering new locations! Children can trace imaginative travel routes (e.g., "Let's go from the United States to Brazil. Which ocean do we cross?") or work in pairs to locate nations, continents, and seas.

This basic exercise promotes curiosity in the planet, promotes cooperation, and teaches young students that Earth is a connected whole rather than just a collection of random places.

Pro-Tip: Give children stickers or tiny flags to indicate the locations they "visit" on their made-up travels. Students can even contribute one interesting information about each place they find as part of a class project!

4. Compass Rose Craft

Use this activity to turn geography into art! Give each pupil a cardstock circle or paper plate, colored pencils, and markers. Assist them with creating their own vibrant compass rose with the labels North, South, East, and West (and, for more advanced students, Northeast, Northwest, Southeast, and Southwest).

When their compass roses are finished, use them for quick activities in class! Try asking "Which Way to the Door? " then call out instructions such as "Take two steps east!” or "Point north!” This will improve children's spatial awareness and geographical vocabulary.

Pro-Tip: To reuse the finished compass roses in other lessons, laminate them. For interactive map activities or review time, you can even place a brad and arrow in the center to spin them!

5. Map Puzzle Challenge

Children can piece the map together in small groups using printed maps or jigsaw puzzles of the world (or your own country). They can start to identify geographical connections and figure out how different parts of the earth are connected as they match continents, oceans, or regions.

Depending on the age of the pupils, you can change the level of complexity. For younger children, start with a nation map; for older students, move on to globe maps or topographic puzzles.

Pro-Tip: To make your puzzle pieces durable for classroom use, laminate them or mount them on cardboard. Add a fun twist by timing each group and rewarding the fastest team or the one who names the most locations correctly!

Tips and Tricks in Teaching Basic Map Coordinates and Globe Skills to Kids

When the basics of geography like latitude, longitude, and directions are taught in innovative, practical ways, it can be an enjoyable experience. Children can explore the world around them and learn how maps and globes help us make sense of it all rather than learning lines and numbers by memory.

Here are some helpful tips and techniques to help you teach children fundamental map coordinates and globe skills so they may learn to read maps, locate countries, and grasp where they are in the world! 

1. Start with the Basics: Directions and Landmarks

Start with familiar things like directions and nearby landmarks before going into coordinates. Teach north, south, east, and west in the classroom, on the playground, or even in the school hallway. You can put direction signs on the classroom walls, such as "The window is to the east!" and ask pupils to locate objects appropriately.

2. Turn Latitude and Longitude into a Game 

Coordinates don't have to be scary. Use games like "Coordinate Battleship" or "Treasure Hunt" to introduce the concept. On paper or the board, create a basic grid map. Let children locate "hidden treasures" at particular locations by using letters for one axis and numbers for the other. This increases their comprehension of how latitude and longitude intersect to find locations on a map or globe.

3. Use Technology Wisely

Incorporate interactive webpages or kid-friendly geography apps such as National Geographic Kids or Google Earth. With the use of these tools, children can virtually explore worldwide locations and visualize coordinates. Allow them to zoom in to locate well-known cities or calculate the distance between two nations. It transforms abstract geography studies into engaging, practical exploration. 

4. Make It Movement-Based

Bring geography and physical activity together! Set up a "Outdoor Coordinates Challenge" in which children must navigate to designated "latitude" and "longitude" lines that are taped or chalked on the ground. Make them run to the right place by calling out the coordinates. This kinesthetic method helps energetic learners grasp spatial relationships better.

KID-FRIENDLY MAP AND GLOBE WORKSHEETS IN THE CLASSROOM

Kid-friendly worksheets are among the best and most interesting ways to teach geography to younger students. These interactive worksheets make studying enjoyable and effective in addition to reinforcing concepts.

You'll learn how kid-friendly geography worksheets might improve your teaching experience. Here’s an evergreen and most-loved resource from fellow educators that you might want to check out.

Teach kindergarten and first-grade students all about maps, globes, cardinal directions, landforms, and bodies of water with this fun and engaging geography unit! These map skills worksheets introduce key concepts such as landforms, oceans, relative directions, map keys and symbols, the compass rose, and Venn diagrams, while also covering 24 essential geography terms. Students even get the chance to design their own maps.

With these worksheets and word wall vocabulary cards, students will practice and create while learning about maps, map skills, personal and relative locations, and cardinal directions, all while expanding their geography vocabulary.



Map and globe activities let young learners view learning as an adventure by integrating imagination and discovery. They are not only learning geography with each landmark, compass rose, or treasure map they make. They are also growing in awareness, curiosity, and a love of exploring the world.

The next time you pull out a map or globe, keep in mind that you are supporting children in becoming explorers of the world that God created, instead of just teaching them locations. 🌍

As usual, I'm committed to making learning interesting and rewarding, so I hope the resources mentioned above are helpful in your classroom. I hope you have an amazing week! I hope you never stop enjoying educating and motivating your pupils. Until the next blog post! 🐷

Looking for some geography-related blogs with relevant resources for your classroom? Here are some of my top ones:

5 Creative Strategies For Making Geography Fun For Young Kids

5 Reasons To Celebrate Columbus Day For Young Kids

Integrating Subjects In The Primary Classroom