Wednesday, May 3, 2017

May Meeting: Scribble Maps

We had a pretty small group at our May meeting, but all three Bookshoppers had positive things to say about our monthly book, The Wolf Keepers by Elise Broach. Most of them hadn't heard of John Muir and hadn't been to Yosemite National Park, so it was fun to learn a little bit about that part of the country. There was some disagreement on whether it would be "awesome" or "smelly" or live in a zoo, but everyone was in agreement that they would have kept Tyler and the mystery of the wolves a secret from their parents, just like Lizzie did. Hmmmmm...

Since there was such a cool map of Yosemite on the endpapers of the book, I thought we would do a little playing around with maps using the free online tool, Scribble Maps. This tool allows you to use Google Maps to search anywhere in the world, and then customize that location with your own icons, text, and pictures to the map to make it your own. Predictably, we went down a bit of a rabbit hole with this activity and instead of customizing maps, most Bookshoppers started looking up their houses and other random places they'd been to or want to visit. This led to finding places NONE of us would want to visit, which led to searching for the biggest and smallest cities/towns in the country. The coveted title of Smallest Town in America belongs to Buford, Wyoming with a population of 1. According to Scribble Maps, there really isn't much of anything there.

In any event, we were having too much fun exploring virtually to do much creation with Scribble Maps, but below are two simple examples (one created by a Bookshopper and one created by me).



Our last meeting of the 2016-2017 school year will be Monday, June 5th, from 5:30-7:00 at the Main Library. We had a tie when voting for the June book, so Bookshop participants have a choice between reading Roller Girl by Victoria Jamieson or Shooting Kabul N. H. Senzai. Or both!

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