Both the 2yo and the 5yo are *very* into maps, which seems to be something that came from watching Dora [the Explorer].Let's talk about maps.
When my kids were little I had a couple of very favorite books involving maps. One's American and one's Australian.
Rose Sorooshian has gotten interested in maps, and I think "a map guy" spoke at the HSC conference last year.
I thought about giving or throwing our globe away just before Christmas. I had to move it to make room for Christmas stuff. It has tape on it, and is outdated, but I thought of how sad I've always been that I gave my own childhood globe away, that had Tanganyika. So I stuck it in the storage room thinking I really should give it away and not be such a packrat.
Less than a week later, Lillian Jones was here, we were talking about Alaska and northern Canada (because of a Canadian map I had out on the table, which used to be in the bathroom) and she said, "Do you have a globe?"
I brought it in, and it's been on the kitchen table or the counter for the past week and a half, and my nephew came and used it (talking about Iceland and Norway), and Holly asked one day where New Zealand was, and then where Hawaii was, and there was that globe, and she asked what that jaggedy line was by Alaska, and so I told her about New Zealand having had Christmas before anyone else and we talked about time zones and the international date line.
Those books I like are My Place and Me on the Map (links below).
Looking to see whether those are still available, I found
Map My India http://mapmyindia.com/My Place is $20 nearly in hardbound re-print at Amazon . Libraries might have it. My Place (Hardcover) by Nadia Wheatley, Donna RawlinsTagzania http://www.tagzania.com/ (I couldn't get it to save my house, but might try again later)
Me on the Map (Dragonfly Books) (Paperback) by Joan Sweeney, Annette Cable is less expensive (under $4 used, $7 new) and has a girl in Kansas, who finds her place at different mapping levels, down to mapping her bedroom.
If you search for "Me on the Map" at Amazon, it will show several similar and more recent books.
Sandra
Currently we have a world map with lots of topographical detail on the wall which has been repeatedly referred to, and a diabolically difficult Earth globe puzzle awaiting our attention.
Boy did we have fun at the newly reopened Griffith Observatory, where they have scale models of all the planets and a really big and detailed earth globe with the ocean floor modeled on it as well as the mountains. The only trouble with it is that it is hard to see the northern latitudes because of the tilt and then the barrier.
We love Google Earth.
http://earth.google.com/
Maps used to always be history, but with Google Earth and such, they are current. That's a new thing, real-time (or even "very recent" maps).
"Strange Maps"
"I like maps. I like weird maps, the kind you won’t find in a regular atlas. Maps of countries that never existed - or never will exist. I’ve given up on categorizing the maps I’ve collected so far - irredentism, alternate history,… - and decided to just be a little less anal. So, just for fun, here are the weirdest maps I found on the internet."
Connections Learning Geography
Internet Medieval Sourcebook: Maps and Images