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Bird’s eye view of the city of Frankfort, the capital of Kentucky 1871.
Teaching About Community and Place with Library of Congress Maps
November 18, 2025, Posted by: Colleen Smith, Share this post…
Teaching the concept of community to elementary students often emphasizes a local community that students are members of, such as a school, neighborhood, town, or city. Maps from the Library’s collections offer teachers a range of tools for helping students see, think about, and form questions to develop a sense of place.
For example, in the primary source set, Community: People and Places, a panoramic map gives students a particular perspective of a city.
Sometimes referred to as “bird’s-eye views,” panoramic maps are great for helping students see different landscapes, street patterns, and prominent buildings. These engaging visual maps can be especially meaningful to young learners. Browse maps by state to locate panoramic maps closest to where your students live.
How teachers use panoramic maps will vary depending what aspect of community they want to explore; however, a few ideas might include:
- Identify and trace waterways shown on a map. What do students notice about the waterway? What do they see on the map that is close to the waterway? Why might it be located there?
- Encourage students to look at street patterns. What clues can students find that tell them which streets have homes or buildings? Where are these streets located on the map?
- Project a contemporary map of the same city or town that the panoramic map shows. Ask: What do they notice about how the place has changed over time? What is different and what is similar?
- Older elementary students might spend time with the map key. Encourage students to look for patterns and ask questions about what types of institutions are included in the key, what surprises them, and why.
The “Additional Resources” section of the Community: People and Places primary source set includes Sanborn Maps, another type of map that could be helpful for exploring different aspects of community and place.
The Sanborn map collection includes large-scale maps of commercial, industrial, and residential sections of thousands of cities and towns in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The maps show the shape and construction of homes, commercial buildings, and factories as well as names of streets and property boundaries. You can search the collection by state and then by city or county. A fascinating use of the Sanborn maps is to explore change over time. This essay details several examples and might inspire ideas to modify for elementary-age students.
Detail from a series of Sanborn Maps of Santa Fe, New Mexico
If you are looking for maps that go beyond a local orientation of community, the Cities and Towns Collection features maps that detail places throughout the world. These maps might be helpful as students start to orient to community in a state, national, or even global context.
If you use maps from these collections with your students, we would love to hear about it! Please share your experiences and teaching recommendations in the comments.
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