Quick Summary
This month’s Resource Pack invites students to explore local, regional, and global maps in eLibrary Minnesota, Ebooks Minnesota, and the Minnesota Digital Library.
February is the perfect time to fall in love... with maps. From tracing familiar places to discovering new ones, maps help us connect to the world, tell stories, and see our communities in new ways. Read ahead to discover how you can encourage students to explore place, space, and perspective in this month’s Resource Pack. The February pack includes a variety of engaging resources from eLibrary Minnesota, Ebooks Minnesota, and Minnesota Digital Library that highlight maps as tools for storytelling, navigation, and history, as well as understanding our communities and environments.
For K–8 students, age-appropriate resources make it easy to find and explore maps of their communities, Minnesota, and the world. Young learners can use Britannica’s safe and accessible interactive maps to support early geography skills and curiosity about place. Check out the World Atlas or the Geography Explorer game. At the high school level, students can find a wide range of maps to support learning in geography, history, and current events by limiting EBSCOHost and Gale searches to the ‘map’ format in advanced search.
Ebooks Minnesota holds engaging map-related materials for younger learners. Explore titles such as How Do You Use a Map? or The Young People’s Atlas of the World, offering children a basic, full-color atlas of the world that features detailed maps, and diagrams. For older readers, be sure to check out the Visual Geography Series, which explores the geography, history, government, culture, and economy of Albania, Denmark, Finland, France, Netherlands, and Slovakia.
Finally, the Minnesota Digital Library (MDL) contains over 1,700 maps of all types. This set highlights examples of each type, including highway maps, tourist maps, land ownership maps, geology maps, bike maps, park maps, and data maps. This pack also links to MDL's interactive StoryMaps, where students can explore photographs and documents in the context of their place and wider historical themes.
Browse the K-12 Resource Pack on maps today!
Image credit: Plat map of Stearns County, Minnesota, 1902. Stearns History Museum collection: https://collection.mndigital.org/catalog/stearns:3453
