Lay out the road map on a large table and show them the town where you currently reside. If they are old enough to read the name of your hometown, then they should be able to locate the place on a map. Your hometown is a place name that should be very familiar to them, so this task would be a great place to begin their map reading education.
Search for the nearest large city to where you live. Don't include the place where you live, if that happens to be a large city. Show your children how the easily identifiable yellow shapes represent an urban area and have them find the name of the city that is always printed right next to the yellow area. You can also explain that yellow urban areas are marked in different sizes to indicate the population of the city.
Locate on the map the roads or highways that lead between your hometown and the nearest big city. After they find the connecting lines, explain how different color lines are used for different types of highways. For example, an interstate highway is usually depicted with a wide red (or sometimes green) line, while a two-lane road is depicted as just a thin black line. Also explain how each highway has a number and sometimes a name that is assigned to it.
Look for any blue areas that are located near your hometown. Explain how blue symbolizes water and how the size of the blue area on the map is approximately the same size of the real body of water. Then look closely at the shape and the name of the blue area. Determine whether the blue area is a lake, river, reservoir, marsh, bay or ocean. Be aware that sometimes the best way to distinguish between different bodies of water is by their name. A reservoir will usually be marked by a small, straight line at one end symbolizing a dam, but this feature may hard to recognize, especially for novice map readers. A marsh often comes with a green symbol for vegetation interspersed with many small dashed, blue lines.
Take a short drive to a fun location and see if the kids can correlate the highway signs and town names that they see by the highway to those on the map.
