5th Grade Cartographers Working in the Classroom and Out in the Field to Create Trail Guides

🗺️🧭Fifth grade cartographers are putting their trimester’s worth of skills and research to the test to create maps of our freshly-blazed PCS trails. While families and students have been hard at work clearing and blazing the new trails, fifth graders have been equally industriously studying — both in the classroom and out in the field — how to create accurate and informative trail maps.

There’s quite a bit more to creating 2D representations of large swaths of 3D space than you might think — they need resources, expertise and skill. So far, students have used measuring wheels to mark out trail distances and brushed up their compass skills to determine trail directions; they’ve traveled to multiple trails throughout Southold town to note their marking systems and trail guides, and they’ve enlisted the help of a surveying company here on site to survey the PCS property and trails. Next up: utilizing drone footage to make the final renderings of the trails they’ve been walking and marking.