Montessori Map Game — Printable Mapping Activity

One day we visited my parents’ house and came home with a miniature village. As a Montessori teacher, I immediately thought of mapping. The girls and I drew up a town map and added the houses to it, then I wrote up some direction cards, and our Map Game activity was born. People on Instagram loved it so much, that I decided to create a printable version — because I guess not everyone has parents with an entire miniature village to give away!

I designed a map of a town with a bunch of common locations — there are houses, a school, a library, a post office, a bank, a store, a park, a playground, a museum, a church, a synagogue, and a mosque. The map prints on 4 pages and also includes printable vehicles to drive on the map, with instructions for assembling all of it.

As with many of my printable activities, I wanted to make something that could be used with children of several different ages at the same time or be used in several different ways by the same child as she grows. So this Montessori Map Game printable has 3 different ways to use it!

For younger children, I included these birds’ eye view map cards that the child can follow on the larger map with a vehicle. You start at the red circle and stop when you reach the red star. Older children can also use these cards — the adult or another child can read the map cards to give verbal directions to the child with the vehicle.

There are also written directions cards using the cardinal directions. These could be read by the child independently, or someone else could read the directions and the child could follow the verbal directions.

The third option is with written directions using left and right. This is the most difficult step, as left and right change relative to the vehicle as it drives along the streets.

And of course you could also write your own directions! Just choose a starting a location and a destination, then write directions for how to drive there.