I have two suggestions for classroom exercises that could be incorporated into geography curricula.  These suggestions fell out of our work with urban police who are responsible for search for missing children.  However, I believe the pedagogical rationale is that the exercises link the child's real-world activities with cultural conventions that must be learned.

The first suggestion comes from the police practice of asking parents of missing children "What is the farthest place that your child goes to independently?"  This question is used to estimate the crow's flight distance of possible travel from point last seen.  The distance serves as a radius of a circle to contain initial search operations.

Crow's flight distance from home is also a measure used in environmental psychology to index home range.  Home range is the territory that includes the child's self-initiated travel.  It is curious in both cases that an area should be represented by a linear estimate, and one suggestion was that police could ask parents about all of the known destinations of their children.  This would yield a skeletal route map and by connecting the endpoints of various routes, a polygon that includes areas where the child may have attempted connections between
routes.

A search manager suggested that a periodic exercise for parents and children would be to sit down with colored pencils and draw a sketch map of the child's travels.  Parents would have more realistic knowledge of their child's adventures and police could ask for recently produced maps.

The extension to teaching of geography is similar to the use of "experience charts" in the whole language method of teaching reading.  Sketch maps are an opportunity to teach--with content that is known and personal--representation of scale, form, and cartographic conventions.  The sophistication of the mapping skills in the curricula can parallel the expansion of home range through the primary school grades.

My second suggestion comes from a police constable who teaches urban safety.  His dialogues in the classroom require children to explain why some landmarks are better than others and what to do when lost.  The opportunity to hear arguments and strategies of peers in a group setting seems to free some youngsters from the embarrassment of discussing their way finding errors.  The constable then asks the youngsters why it is that their parents restrict their travel and what their parents tell them to do when preparing for a trip.  The opportunity to explain the reasoning of another helps children to remember to produce strategies when appropriate (cf.
Siegler, 1995, Cognitive Psychology).

The extension to teaching of geography is the prospective use of maps.  Children can be provided city bike trail maps, road maps, and survey maps.  They can examine the format and key in groups, using the map to solve a traveling salesman type problem‹-a least distance solutions to visiting several sites on the same outing.  The conventions of city grid systems, trails based on topography (passes reduce climbing), and information available from different representations can be taught in the context of what the child is doing during the expansion of their home range.