Neighbourhood maps

I made a map from styrofoam, braille for street names, bumps to locate house and school and controlled intersection (although those came off too easily).

There are three uncontrolled intersection and one controlled intersection (traffic lights). As the main road is really noisy, I got him to indent those roads... as we do in New Zealand.

I made a very complicated map as I found out afterwards. He had a very hard time figuring out where he was, what the roads were, etc etc. This was my first route map and so it was a bit of trial and error. This is what it looked like.

After discussing his inability of 'getting it', I was offered the following suggestion: get the student to help you make the map. Now this isn't brain surgery, and I have done this before but it just didn't dawn on me to do this for him.

So I did. So we did. Since he had used the complicated map before, he knew the location of his school and of his home. Those were the two reference points that we put on the map. Next, I gave him some Wikki-stix as roads. These Wikki-stix sort of stick to the paper and this makes the perfect 'equipment' for doing doing this. He was able to put the main road on the map. From the main road, he put the side streets. He definitely likes this simpler map better than the other one.

Here's the picture of the simpler map.

The pen is to let you know how big the map really is. The top right hand corner is the school, and the white round bit is his home.
He made the street curve to his home too. This helped him understand this road (that he keeps wanting to cross).