Map Your Community

As mandated by the Constitution, the U.S. government is required to collect demographic information of the nation’s population every 10 years. Demographic information can include the number of people and kids in your family, age of each person, and ethnic origin — these are just a few examples of the information collected in the census. In addition to being used to determine the number of Electoral College votes and seats in the House of Representatives each state receives, census results are an important source of data for social scientists and statisticians and determining local government budgets. Understanding demographic changes like population growth, migration, racial and ethnic diversity, family size, and other details requires a large amount of accurate data like the U.S. Census is designed to collect! 

The more humans understand our population, the better prepared they are to understand our world. We’re all on this planet together; let’s make sure we know our neighbors. Use your drawing and counting skills to investigate your own neighborhood’s population.

Tools: 

  • Paper 

  • Sketching utensil (pencil and eraser) 

  • Markers, colored pencils, or crayons 

  • Chalk (potentially if you want to sketch your map on the pavement)

Steps:

Step 1: Take a tour of your neighborhood to get the lay of the land and decide what you would like to map. You could map just your home with all the rooms, your apartment complex with the number of floors and rooms per level, the street that your house is on, or the larger community you might be a part of. You decide much you want to map.

Step 2: Begin to sketch out your map. With light pencil or chalk, roughly sketch out where everything on your map will go: buildings, streets, parks, trees, water bodies – whatever you fancy! If you are in an apartment complex, you could include the number of floors and units too.   

Step 3: When you believe you completed your sketched map, take some time to color it in and make the map clearer using markers, colored pencils, crayons, etc.

Step 4: Next, label the things you have drawn on your map: my house, Sarah’s house, Tracy Street, Coral Lake. Be sure to include a legend and a compass to make sure whoever views this can read it too.

Step 5: Finally, use your map to count all your neighbors.  At the end of this activity, tally how many people live in your neighborhood or apartment building. Congrats, you now have the skills of a cartographer and mathematician!

To Do or Learn More: