Kayli and her friends, Catherine and Madeline, completed their Girl Scout Silver Award today with the painting of the US State Map at their school. Over the summer the school parking lot was repaved, resulting in the removal of the state map that was there. The girls remembered how much fun they had playing on the map when they were younger and wanted to give that experience to the kids at their school. The girls did a great job getting this coordinated and accomplished.
We have a few lessons learned for anyone planning to do this type of project for their school. We purchased the template from Peaceful Playgrounds. You will want to bring masking tape to hold down the template. Without the tape, it would have been very hard to keep the template in place while spraying the dots. Decide ahead of time which numbers go with which paint colors on the numbered paint guide provided with the template. Write those on the guide then make a bunch of copies. Give a copy to four different people and assign them each one color so they can dot that paint color onto each state. This makes it easy for everyone to know what color to paint each state. Print out a close-up of the small east coast states. It was very hard to figure out where to draw the lines for all those little states once we pulled up the template. For the lakes, instead of buying light blue paint, we mixed the blue with the white to create the color we needed. Use a downward sprayable paint can to fill in the circles in the template. We used up one whole can and part of another one. (We did the smaller Alaska.) We used less than a gallon of each of the four paint colors, we went with red, blue, yellow and green. We really love the way the bright colors look and have gotten complements from the school about how it turned out.
First step – tape down the template
Next fill in circles in template
That will leave you with a dot outline of all the states.
Now connect all the dots to form the state outlines with the white paint.
Finally fill in all the states with the appropriate paint color.
Now you get to enjoy your new map!
