Myford Elementary School, in Irvine, California, celebrated GIS Day 2005 for the 3rd year. We started this event in one Kindergarten classroom in year 2003. This year almost half of the school participated in this event. More than 300 students, from K-3rd grade, were fortunate to learn about GIS and the use of it in our daily life. The children were involved in many different activities.

Mrs. Haderlein took the lead for the kindergartener activities. Mrs Ramirez coordinated the activities with seven classes of 1st graders. Teachers and parents helped the kids make MapHats and plan their own city. The children made the houses out of milk and juice containers wrapped with colored papers. They have created their own streets after their teachers' name, and each class created a big map on their wall. On Nov. 16th, each child put his/her own house on the big map. Then they did the analysis on where they should plan all of the public facilities to be.

In the 2nd grade, Mrs. Vela's class played the GIS Jeopardy game. The group who won got GIS Day T-shirts. They also played GIS games on the computer.

Mrs. Schell's class (3rd grade) put the continents with the latitude/longitude lines on the globe made out of pumpkins.

Mrs. Fadderly's class (3rd grade) made "Our Place in Space" flip books which showed the city, county, country, continent, hemisphere, and planet that we live on. They also created landform maps of Orange County and have made landform books which have landforms and their definitions, along with illustrations of the specific landform.

Mrs. Nancy Lev, the principal of the school, was very impressed with the activities. She expressed her interest to include a "GIS Awareness Week" in the school plan for next year.

Submitted by Suzanne Timani Takieddine, ESRI-Redlands.