New World Map
By: Amanda Formaro
Difficulty: Easy
Age: 7 and up
Parental supervision is recommended
;)
When Columbus came to the Americas, the realization of the "New World" opened up all sorts of possibilities to the Spanish. Make your own map of Columbus's voyages and pretend to be a world explorer!
Make sure to visit our Columbus Day page for even more fun. As well, check out our fall crafts, printables, Presidents' Day page and more.
What you'll need:
- Brown paper grocery bag
- Pencil
- Scissors
- Water color paints: blue, brown, green
- White craft paint
- Paintbrush
- Black marker
- Lighter (optional: for parents only!)
How to make it:
- Cut a rectangle from the side of the grocery bag that does not have seams.
- Use a pencil to draw simple land designs on the front of your bag (refer to photo or a world map for general idea).
- Paint the land on the right green and the land on the left brown.
- Paint the remaining areas (water) blue, leaving a small border around the land unpainted. Let paint dry.
- When dry, use a black marker to add an outline to the land masses.
- Write the words “New World” on the land mass in the upper left and “Spain” on the upper right land mass, on the left side of that piece of land. We wrote ours similar to calligraphy.
- Use the marker to draw small curved lines around the water to represent waves.
- Draw a dotted line from “Spain” to the lower left land mass.
- Draw three small ships above the dotted line.
- Add another coat of green and brown watercolor paint to the land masses, except where the words are. Going around the words will give it a more dimensional look when dry.
- Use a small paintbrush and white acrylic paint to paint the sails of the ships, an upper and lower line around the dotted voyage line and thin white curves above the wave curves.
- When white paint is dry, outline the ship sails with a black marker.
- This step is optional and should ONLY be done by a grown up or parent: Use a lighter to lightly burn the edges of the brown paper map to give it an aged look.
Tips:
- Add more details to this map as you study Columbus Day at school.
- Watercolor paints are often forgotten in the age of acrylic craft paint. Keep a set or two of watercolors on hand for weekend or rainy day fun.
- Add Columbus’s other voyages to the map as you learn more about his travels, there were 4 all together.
