Happy GIS Day!

OK, really it's tomorrow. But I'm celebrating today! I got to do a presentation at my daughter's kindergarten class. What a hoot. Seeing their eager little faces was definitely the highlight of my day. Thanks to ESRI's easy-to-download and follow instructions, I put together a killer talk about "What is Geography" and they learned the words "classify," "atlas" and "cartography." Fortunately, they'd been working on sorting for math, so that tied in very nicely. Then each child made a map hat, where they had to classify different items into where that item was found. Then the strips were stapled together to make a funky little hat. The kids loved them.

Gracie with her map hat. She also wanted to talk about an actual map, which she did - very quietly.

And of course, you can't have 24 five-year-olds without some surprising moments. From reading with my daughter, I'm used to working through letter-recognition and then sounding out different parts of a word. So I used the same techniques with the class:

Me: "OK, what letter is this?"

Class: "A!"

Me: "And this?"
Class: "T! L! A! S!"

Me: "Great! Let's sound it out together. Aaaatttttlaasss..."

And from the back of the room: "Atlas of the World!"

So there is a wide range of learners in her class.