3rd Grade Explorers Spreadsheet & Map
Third graders at Laburnum Elementary have been learning about the first European explorers in the New World (SOL3.5c,d). Today students in Ms. Burgess’ class learned how to enter data about the explorers into a spreadsheet and upload it into a Google map. I gave each student a copy of an “Explorers Spreadsheet” (you can make a copy of the spreadsheet here). The explorers’ names are already on the spreadsheet, but students had to do research to enter the remaining information – sponsor country, final destination, and length of trip. For the length of the trip, we first tried finding the mileage of the trip, but realized it was easier to find the length of the trip in days. We were surprised by what we discovered in our research because the lengths of the various trips were very different from our initial predictions. After we entered the data, we highlighted it all and clicked the graph button to make a bar graph. Next we went to “My Google Maps” and clicked the “Add Layer” button. We imported our spreadsheet from Google Drive and checked off “Sponsor” for the placemarks and “Explorer” for the label. Then Google maps automatically created the placemarks in the correct spots. To create an additional set of placemarks for the destinations, we repeated the steps above, but checked off “Landed” for the placemarks. Finally, students could customize the placemarkers by changing the colors and adding photos. You can see a sample spreadsheet here (they were all pretty much the same) and a sample map here.