Next week is Geography Awareness Week. The future of food is the theme of this year’s Geography Awareness Week. National Geographic has created a collection of resources about the theme of the future of food. One of the resources in that collection is a map of the staple food crops of the world. The map depicts where in the world ten staple crops were produced and the quantities produced. All of the layers of the map can be used in National Geographic’s MapMaker Interactive.

Applications for Education
MapMaker Interactive is a good tool to use to introduce concepts of map creation to elementary school and middle school students. You could have students use the staple food crops map layers in conjunction with other layers to have formulate ideas about why a particular country or region produces a type of staple crop.