During Social Studies this week, students have been very busy creating their own map of Colchester.  Given a traced outline of our town, students filled in the bordering towns:  Essex, Winooski, Burlington, and Milton.  We also filled in the two rivers contained within our town:  the Winooski River and the Lamoille River.  We added Lake Champlain to the West, complete with Malletts Bay’s two bays-the Inner Bay and the Outer Bay.  Finally, we added Colchester Pond and a compass rose.  We then brought our maps to life by painting with watercolors.  In between all of our hard work on our maps, students were able to build puzzles of maps of the United States.  It’s amazing to listen to them very quickly learn the name of the different states as they look for which piece to put in next.  With the addition of a new classmate, children have quickly discovered that while Vermont may be a small state, Rhode Island is even smaller, and it’s near the ocean.  This week, we will finish our Colchester maps, which will be sent home, and set to work on making maps in collaboration with our two field trips to Bayside Park and Mazza’s Pumpkin Patch.  As Unit 2 progresses in math, we will be adding a map piece to our weekly math instruction as well.  Please enjoy these pictures of our cartographers hard at work.