New Sweden students take walk around Asia

    NEW SWEDEN, Maine — The Giant Map of Asia came to the New Sweden School on Oct. 28, much to the delight of its students. The Giant Map of Asia is part of the educational material available to schools through the Maine Geographic Alliance.
Each classroom at the New Sweden School visited the 25-foot by 35-foot map of Asia and participated in appropriate grade level activities.
A favorite activity across the grade levels was the Simon Says game, which sent students to various countries, landforms and capitals. Many students were also very impressed with the size of the map and the fact they could walk on it.
Students from Mr. Easter’s sixth- to eighth-grade class learned about population and population density across Asia.
Ashley said her favorite part was using the giant map with the building blocks to represent population. It was easy to compare.
Anya was interested to find out that Singapore was both a country and a city. She said, “I enjoyed the Asia Map and I think it would be really cool to see the one of Europe.”
Noah liked interacting with the giant map and getting a picture of how big some of Asia’s countries were by being able to walk around the map.
Grades three to five’s focus was landforms.
Evan asked, “Did you know that Asia has a lot of lakes and dams?”
Amalla loved learning about her favorite country, Japan. She said about the map, “It was bigger than I expected.”
“This map was the first map I’ve ever walked on,” said Reid.
Angela remarked that, “playing Simon Says helped me learn about Asia.”
Kammie liked to walk on the big map and thought it was the biggest map she had ever seen.
Arianna liked to see and hear about countries she didn’t know about. “There were a lot of dams and landforms. We got to growl like tigers and be like pandas,” she pointed out.
George took away from the activity that land and fresh water were among the causes of wars across Asia.
Silas said that he liked that Mongolia was, “just my size.”
Maya thought the map was really cool because it was so big. “It’s the biggest map I’ve ever seen and I won two times playing Simon Says!” she exclaimed.
Grades one and two focused on boundaries, mountains and oceans.
Isaac, Maggie and Douglas just liked being able to walk around Asia on the map.
Crystal said, “My favorite thing about the map was that it was so big! My friend Jolena was standing on Mt. Everest, the biggest mountain in the world.”
“We all got to walk to the North Pole,” Tasha said.
Kindergarten and pre-K focused on boundaries, mountains and oceans.
James said, “We got to pretend we were cold walking on ice to find the polar bears.”
“I liked when one lady talked about when she flew to Norway and the islands where the polar bears were. I want to do that someday,” said Nolan. “I also liked pretending I was a mountain and a desert walking on the map.”