Mapping Nevada

One of the most interesting things you can do is look at maps of the area that you live in. There is so much information you can learn that you never knew before. Living in Nevada, there is so much vast area where people don't live and unless you were to drive out there, maps would be your only key to learning about these areas. But what if you were the one making these maps. What kind of information would you want your readers to know? In class we are trying to put together an atlas of Nevada hence my topic today, mapping Nevada. We have been discussing for awhile know the topics we think are important and the viewers that we expect would be looking at these maps. So we chose 4th graders as our expected viewers. Making an atlas of Nevada for fourth graders, we don't want to get to detailed and we want to make the maps fun to look at so the fourth graders will not lose their interest. For me, one of the coolest topics and one of the map pages for the atlas that I suggested was on climate. I think this would be a good page because it is important to know why Nevada is the way it is and how the weather affects this. On my climate page, I would talk about how much annual precipitation the Nevada receives, rain and snow. I would also talk about the annual temperatures and give a brief description of what it's like to live in the state of Nevada through each season. I would also like to give a brief description of the rain shadow effect. I think it is important for younger kids to know why Nevada is a desert when nearby California is green and recieves a lot more rainfall. To make this page interesting, I would add fun facts like how many days of sun Nevada expects to see each year or another fun filled fact about weather. As far as the cartography side of this goes, I think it would be interesting to design maps showing the relationships between Nevada's annual precipitation and temperatures or things like that. Another cool image could be taken from Nasa's World Wind. This photograph from space could show what the clouds do as they approach Nevada and disappear during a storm. This would be excellent evidence combined with an actual picture showing the rain shadow effect. There are many different atlas pages we could come up with for Nevada. Nevada is an interesting place and mapping it is even more interesting. The map at the top right was taken from about.com and shows the geology of Nevada