The Maps

Alton Ziegler, the main character in Map Trap, loves maps.  He creates maps of people's brains, based on evidence he has for what seems to preoccupy their thoughts.  His map of his teacher's brain shows that she thinks quite a lot about her little brother as well as the Chicago Bears.

We used brain pictures to design our our own mental maps.


A big portion of my brain is labeled, "Thirdland."  I think about my job constantly.  Room 200 is always with me.  I also have sections labelled WRITING, WORRIES, and NATURE. I think about my family a lot, but I didn't add a section about family.  I figured everyone would have that on their maps and I want to move past expected topics.

I talked through my map with the Thirdlanders.  Then we looked up geography words in our social studies books and checked out some physical feature maps. I want this writing project to be from a cartographer's perspective, so we're going to integrate geographical terms into our descriptions. After looking over maps, I relabeled my map with The Writing Mountains, National Forest of Worries, Coastal Nature Preserve and Thirdland Urban Areas.   Many of the Thirdlanders had regions for Video Games on their maps.  They also had regions called LOVE, MY DOG, and FAMILY.  One Thirdlander said, "The biggest region of my brain is called My Brother.  I love him so much." Another said, "I'm not sure if my family or my dog should be a bigger area?"

kestrel 

These are kind of like the heart maps that many classrooms create during writing workshop, so I'm thinking of ways to shake it up a bit.  I want to publish pieces that tell about why we think about particular items and events so much.  Are there any down sides to having certain patterns of thinking?  I also want to look at connections and differences among all of us in Thirdland.

We're just getting started. I'll keep you posted.