Don’t tell me if someone has already done this, but I finally drew an accessible world map. Straddling the GenX/Millenial line means I know how to use electronics better than a Zoomer, but not as well as a true dyed-in-the-wool GenX. Consequently, I have been struggling to find the perfect whole world map for nigh on 7 years now. You’d think it would be easy, but it needed to:

A) Be easily photocopiable and printable (you’d be shocked at how many maps have weird gray areas or water that don’t copy well).
B) Have the longitude and latitude lines go OVER the countries. This is super important to be able to draw it using the grid method.
C) Be the least garbled Mercator projection so the grids are in straight lines.
D) Have nice thick, easily traceable lines so it could be put on a window or lightbox.
E) Fit on a standard 8.5×11, but also be printable in bigger sizes.

It has been driving me crazy for years because I’m sure it exists somewhere and I didn’t need to draw one myself, but I couldn’t find one I liked. But I really didn’t want to make one myself because drawing the whole world takes time and effort…two things in short supply when you have 4 kids and a million other responsibilities and priorities taking up one’s time (like reading historical fiction till 2am…cough cough). I tried several times, but someone always spilled something on it, or I couldn’t get the perspectives and lines right. It was my own personal Sisyphean task…every time I worked on it, I somehow found myself back at the beginning.

So even though it feels rather anti-climatic at this point (faint drumroll), here is a fully traceable, fully drawable, fully expandable world map that may or may not be totally accurate. (I used Google Maps for the most up-to-date borderlines, but the world isn’t exactly stable and black and white right now):

There’s even a matching blank grid included. I think drawing and familiarizing kids with the world is incredibly important, especially these days. Once when I was working as a server, I had a table of customers who were from Kyrgyzstan. They asked me if I even knew where their country was. Not only could I tell them where it was, I could also tell them every country that bordered it. In all fairness, they didn’t realize how many years I’d been teaching middle schoolers how to draw the world by heart. But seriously, world news and issues make so much more sense if you have a working mental picture of the world.

I’ll get off my soap box now. I figure at the very least I made an exceptionally time-intensive free art page. Heck, you could even print it super large, paint it with your color scheme, and frame it… or color all the places with missionaries you pray for…or color in a new country every day and do a unit study…or…or… I’ll stop now.

If you are inspired to have your kids learn to draw the whole world by memory, you can find the sum of all my labors here: https://www.etsy.com/listing/1185775539/cartography-workbook-challenge-a-now-1st