Where is home? Map Activity

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Our 11th-grade students read one of 10 texts over the summer that all fall under the topic of “Mobility and Home.” Therefore, I created a get-to-know-you activity with the same concept. This activity will work well in schools with large immigrant/expat populations whose students have complicated and disparate notions of “home.”

I did this activity using Padlet. Your school may have a subscription, or you can make 3 Padlets for free. You could always use a physical map and sticky notes for this activity, too, either placing a large one somewhere in your classroom or smaller ones on desk clusters.  

(In case you’re interested our literary choices were: Homer’s The Odyssey, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah. Our non-literary choices were: Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, Jamie Andrew’s Life and Limb, Michelle Obama’s Becoming, Mary Robinson’s Climate Justice, or Thoreau’s Walden.)

The Process

  1. Create a new Map Padlet. As you’re setting it up, you may want to hit the toggle on some of the Modify settings, namely Attribution and Comments so your students can see who wrote what and can respond to each other.  
  2. One by one, a few minutes at a time, reveal the following questions to the students, asking them to place their answers on the map with whatever additional details they’d like to provide: 
    • Where were you born? 
    • Where do you feel most local? 
    • Where do your parents or other important people in your life feel most “local”? 
    • Where else in the world have you lived? 
    • Where are the various “homes” of the protagonists of your stories, or the authors of your summer reading? If the notion of home is complicated for your character or author, explain why. 
  3. Finally, bring it all together by looking at all the data gathered. This could be a great time for a See, Think, Wonder, or you could more casually ask for their objective observations and wonderings.  
  4. Document their observations and wonderings and leave them up somewhere in the class for a while! If you’re doing a unit on the concept of Home, you could revisit them later in the unit.