What is love? What are the things that you love the most? If we could see inside your heart, what would we find there? These are the questions we examined in our class through the Map of My Heart project. All of this really began when we noticed the children showing an interest in making maps at the writing table. To support and challenge their thinking, we added special “map paper” and an amazing book called My Map Book by Sara Finelli to our writing centre. In My Map Book, Finelli inspires us to think about maps in a whole new way with wonderful images of maps including: “A Map of My Dog,” “A Map of My Day,” “A Map of My Stomach,” and yes, “A Map of My Heart.”

With Valentine’s Day approaching, I wanted to discuss the theme of love and friendship with my students. To get them thinking about love, we focused on Finelli’s heart map and talked about what we might find in our own hearts. At the Art Studio, we offered the children an opportunity to continue thinking about these questions by making their own heart maps (see the original idea from Playful Learning here: http://playfullearning.net/2009/01/map-of-my-heart/). I felt it was important to give the children as much thinking time as possible for this activity, so rather than having them dive right in to the drawing and painting process, we provided them with planning paper so they could jot down their ideas first. This also had the added bonus of creating some lovely opportunities for dialogue between children as they shared their plans with each other. I found that throughout the art process, children routinely referred back to their plans to help them include all their original ideas in their art piece.

After planning, the children set to work filling in their heart maps. We used permanent black markers for the drawing process and watercolour paints to add colour when the drawings were complete. As part of our evaluation and discussion of Finelli’s heart map, some children felt that some things would naturally take up more space in our hearts (e.g. more love for my family = a large space in my heart vs a little bit of love for flowers, which would = a smaller corner of my heart) and tried to represent this in their work. Overall, I felt the finished pieces so charmingly represented all of the things my students hold dear – and I learned even more about what kinds of things/experiences are really important to the children in my class.