Ancestor Geography Circles

2/9/2015

If you are an elementary educator, you've likely seen versions of this particular activity on educational blogs or Pinterest. It's a visual, hands-on way of teaching young children about geographic scale using a series of circles that increase in size as each geographic feature increases in size. My seven-year-old son brought one home from school the other day, so I thought about doing this at home, not only as a way to learn about geographic scale, but also as a way for my kids to learn about where some of their ancestors lived.

First, you need to cut out differently-sized circles on construction paper or scrapbook paper. I used my set of kitchen pots, along with some smaller bowls and cups, to trace circles on the paper. Before making ancestor sets, I highly recommend making a circle set that is applicable to your child. This way, they will be able to compare and contrast their set with their ancestor sets.

You must choose the geographic divisions you will highlight in each set. We did city, state, country, continent, and planet. If you will be doing an international set, as we did here, you may have to equate 'state' with a similar, but different, geographic division - we used the Italian regiones or regions. Of course, I also recommend doing this activity with fellow U.S. ancestors, and for those cases, you could probably even add in the county level and even a street level as the smallest division.

I obtained all of the map images from Google Maps. I printed out names of the geographic divisions and the names of each location, and we glued them under the maps. We dedicated the smallest circle on top to our ancestor's photo and name. We laminated our set for durability, but that's not necessary. Simply punch a hole in the top of each circle and connect them all with a book ring.