Today we worked on creating symbolic provincial maps as part of our Canadian Identity and Geography unit. The students had to fill in a blank outline of a province or territory with various symbols from four main categories.
- culture
- industry
- wildlife
- land
In the example below, notice how the student has used each of these categories quite effectively. He has shown good examples of culture, using tipis in an area of the province that has a large Anishnaabe and Ojibway population. He has used a drawing of a car to symbolize the auto industry in Ontario (though the placement of this car should have been closer to Windsor). He has used lots of wildlife, including a polar bear near Cochrane. He has even included some of Ontario's lakes in the map and indicated forested regions with a tree. Well done!
Of course, this is not a scripted activity, and the students had to conduct the research and determine their own symbols to use. There are some obvious places that I would have liked to have seen on the map, such as Ottawa and Niagara Falls, but this is a good example of a finished copy. If your child has taken this activity home to complete, please remember that they are not to simply copy the map above, but use it as a guide for their own symbolic map.
