Cartographic Response to Changes in Teaching Geography and History - Maps for the Future Children Education and Internet - page 206

17.3.1 Kindergarten

The first questions could be “when should we start?” There was a discussion
between the old cartographic generation keeping positions in the state cartographic
company and the new generations working for private companies. Before 1990, the
pupils faced the first map in the geography lessons in the third grade (10-year-old
children). Nowadays, children receive everyday information by the media, radio,
TV, Internet and they start to use and read maps in their kindergarten age. The fact
that young kids are able to use maps was proved by experiences with children in 15
kindergartens in Sofia. The children had knowledge about the names of continents,
Bulgarian boundaries and cities, the names of the biggest mountains and rivers.
They were very active and accepted the questionnaire as a pleasant game. Based on
this experiment, we created two posters for kindergarten:

1. Plants and animals in the World, and Plants and animals in Bulgaria on the back
side of the poster (Fig. 17.1 ).
2. The major sights in Bulgaria, and Six great Bulgarian personalities of our history
on the back side of the poster (Fig. 17.2 ).

Our work for and with the children in kindergartens aims to achieve results in
several aspects:

￿ Prepare children for their first school lessons which need the use of maps;
￿ Improve their geography culture;

Fig. 17.1 Plants and animals in the world