Measuring the Miles on a Map

Last year, I stumbled upon a way to have my students measure the miles that Uncle Reuben traveled in his adventures in the 1920's and 30's for The Uncle Reuben Project that I thought I would share here.

We studied the map key on the large wall map that we used to mark Reuben's travels. I showed them where the key showed how long 100 miles is on that map. We talked about whether that would be the same for our small map in our notebook or the large carpet map in our classroom until I felt they understood that the map key was for that particular map only.

Then, I gave each student a 12 inch length of ribbon (the curling, gift wrap kind) and a tiny piece of paper the length of 100 miles on our map. The students marked ten 100 mile marks on their ribbons with a pen so they had 1000 miles on the ribbon.

They learned very quickly how to measure using the ribbon.

Read about their success during the first year of the project by clicking here.