Make a Treasure Map

Pirates need maps! Together you’ll draw a simple bird’s-eye map of a room you both know — looking down on it as if from up near the ceiling — then hide a “treasure” and mark it with an X so someone can follow the map to find it. This is one of the first times a child meets a big idea: a little drawing on paper can stand for a whole real room. Keep it playful and proud — the early maps will look more like scribbly pictures than real maps, and that’s exactly right.

  1. Walk the space and name the big things — the bed, the door, the window, the rug, the toy box. These landmarks become the anchors for “X marks the spot.”
  2. Imagine looking down from above. Ask, “if you were a little bird up near the ceiling, what would the bed look like from the top?” Standing on a step (with you holding on) or looking at a photo taken from high up makes the bird’s-eye view easier.
  3. Draw the big landmarks on paper. On a large sheet, draw the big things first and roughly where they go — bed here, door there. Don’t worry about size or straight lines; a blob for the bed is perfect.
  4. Hide the treasure and mark the X. Hide a small toy somewhere safe, then mark a big X on the map where it is, talking it through: “the treasure is under the chair, so the X goes here, near the chair.”
  5. Someone follows the map to find it, reading the X out loud: “go past the bed… the X is beside the toy box!”
  6. Swap roles — now you hide a treasure and draw a quick map, and your child follows yours; following a grown-up’s map is often easier and builds confidence.

Variation: make the bird’s-eye view easier by starting tiny — map a single tabletop or a dollhouse, placing toy furniture and then drawing each piece from straight above.

Variation: once one room is easy, map the garden, or the route to the park, drawing the path with its landmarks (the gate, the big tree, the postbox); or photograph the room and let your child draw the X and landmarks right on top. Add a simple key (a red circle means a chair) for extra challenge.

Requirements

  • Space: A familiar, well-known space the child can see and walk around — their own bedroom, the living room, or the garden. Familiarity matters more than size; start small (one room, or even a tabletop) before the whole garden or a route.
  • Surface: A table or the floor to draw on; a clipboard or large book lets the child draw while standing in the room and looking around, which helps them connect paper to space.
  • Materials: Essentially free — a large sheet of paper and crayons or chunky markers, plus one small treasure to hide. Optional: a printed photo of the room to draw on top of, toy furniture or a dollhouse for the tabletop version, and stickers to use as map symbols.
  • Participants: 1 child + an adult who models how to make a map (drawing landmarks from above, marking the X) and plays the finder following the child's map — and who makes a map for the child to follow, since swapping roles is half the fun. Siblings can join as extra hiders and seekers.
  • Supervision: Light — the adult is mostly a play partner, but set ground rules first about where treasure can go (no climbing, nothing breakable, and outdoors stay within agreed boundaries).

Rationale & Objective

Making a map is a small act with a big cognitive payoff. To draw a room from above and mark where treasure is, a child has to grasp representational correspondence — the insight that a mark on paper stands for a real thing — which symbolic-development research treats as a genuine milestone, not a given (DeLoache, 1987, 2000; Liben & Downs, 1989). They also wrestle with scale (a whole room shrunk onto a page) and with an allocentric, bird’s-eye viewpoint unlike the ground-level view they actually live in. This is large-scale spatial reasoning — thinking about the layout of a navigable space — and it nicely complements the small-scale, in-the-hand shape work in the rest of this subdomain; Uttal (2000) argues the relationship runs both ways, with maps both serving as tools children use and helping accelerate spatial development. Along the way the activity is a natural home for positional and route language — above, below, beside, between, in front of, behind, go past — the very vocabulary named in Common Core K.G.A.1, Head Start ELOF P-MATH 10, and the EYFS aim to describe a familiar route using words like in front of and behind.

Honest framing — true map understanding develops slowly and is still very much emerging at five; children this age routinely struggle with scale, with alignment (map and room facing different ways), and with the bird’s-eye viewpoint itself (Liben & Downs, 1993). Expect a side-on picture of the room rather than an accurate plan, and treat early drawings as schematic and proud, not precise. This plants the seed — it gives “a drawing that stands for real space” a fun first outing — and the evidence that map experience supports spatial development is largely correlational.

Progress Indicators

  • Early: draws a picture of the room from the side (a bed seen front-on, a tree standing up) or scatters random objects on the page, and can’t yet use the drawing to find anything — but loves the hiding and seeking, marks an enthusiastic X, and is starting to hear position words like under and behind.
  • Developing: places two or three real landmarks (bed, door, toy box) in roughly the right relative positions, marks an X near the treasure’s spot, and finds the treasure when following the map with a lot of adult help.
  • Proficient: draws a recognisable top-down arrangement of the main landmarks — you can tell which blob is which and they’re in believable places — and uses their own map to locate the treasure mostly independently, narrating the route with position words.
  • Advanced: keeps the landmarks in correct relative positions and roughly proportioned, adds a simple key or invented symbols, both follows a map and gives spoken route directions (“go past the sofa, the X is between the bookshelf and the door”), and can stretch to a bigger space like the garden.

Safety Notes

  • Set hiding-spot rules before you start: no climbing on furniture, nothing breakable or precious, and no hiding things inside cupboards, drawers, or appliances with a latching or heavy lid that could shut on a hand.
  • Keep treasures and toys age-appropriate — avoid small parts that could choke a younger child who joins the hunt.
  • For garden or outdoor mapping, supervise actively and agree clear boundaries, staying away from roads and gates, ponds or pools, tools, and any unstable structures.
  • Use child-safe crayons or chunky markers, and keep sharp pencils away from younger siblings.

Hints

  • Playfulness: lean all the way into the pirate fantasy — a pirate voice, paper aged with a crumple, a dotted walk-this-way trail, and a bold red X, with a triumphant “X marks the spot!” when the treasure turns up.
  • Sustain interest: keep swapping who hides and who seeks and change the treasure each round (a sticker, a snack, a tiny toy); following the map you drew is usually easier and more rewarding than making one, so alternate to keep the wins coming.
  • Common mistake: don’t expect an accurate, to-scale map and don’t “correct” or redraw it for them — a side-on bed and a wonky room are completely normal at five, so celebrate the attempt. The other trap is starting too big; begin with one room or even a single tabletop.
  • Limited space: no big rooms needed — map a tabletop, a tray, or a dollhouse: set out a few toys, look straight down on them, and draw each one from above. The small, in-reach world makes the tricky bird’s-eye view much easier to grasp.
  • Cross-domain: a map is early writing and symbol-making (a mark that means something), positional language (above, below, behind), storytelling (the pirate adventure), and a first taste of geography and diagram-reading.
  • Progression: map a tabletop with toy landmarks → map one room with two or three big landmarks → use that map to find a hidden treasure → add more landmarks and a simple key → map the garden or the route to the park, drawing the path and its landmarks.

Sources

  • DeLoache, J. S. (1987). Rapid change in the symbolic functioning of very young children. Science, 238(4833), 1556–1557.
  • DeLoache, J. S. (2000). Dual representation and young children’s use of scale models. Child Development, 71(2), 329–338.
  • Liben, L. S., & Downs, R. M. (1989). Understanding maps as symbols: The development of map concepts in children. Advances in Child Development and Behavior, 22, 145–201.
  • Liben, L. S., & Downs, R. M. (1993). Understanding person-space-map relations: Cartographic and developmental perspectives. Developmental Psychology, 29(4), 739–752.
  • Uttal, D. H. (2000). Seeing the big picture: Map use and the development of spatial cognition. Developmental Science, 3(3), 247–264.
  • Huttenlocher, J., Newcombe, N., & Vasilyeva, M. (1999). Spatial scaling in young children. Psychological Science, 10(5), 393–398.
  • Common Core State Standards for Mathematics, Kindergarten — Geometry: K.G.A.1 (describe relative positions using above, below, beside, in front of, behind, and next to); note that formal map and coordinate work is a later, Grade-5+ standard.
  • Head Start Early Learning Outcomes Framework (ELOF), Mathematics Development — Goal P-MATH 10: explores the positions of objects in space. Related: UK EYFS Development Matters (2021), describe a familiar route and discuss routes and locations using words like in front of and behind; HighScope Mathematics KDI 35 (Spatial awareness); Teaching Strategies GOLD Objective 21a.