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Activity: What Do Students Already
Know
about Buying a Home? A Mapping Activity
A mapping activity asks students to brainstorm
ideas about a particular topic or question, and then to
organize them into categories and subcategories by drawing
overlapping, concentric, and/or independent circles around
related words and concepts. This particular mapping activity
compares renting and owning. Not only is it a great vocabulary
builder and discussion starter, but it also allows students
to view themselves as experts and to learn from one another.
In order to gauge how much my students
knew about home buying, we did a whole-class mapping exercise.
I wrote the terms “to rent” and “to buy”
on the blackboard and recorded the terms that my students
came up with. I explained that these terms were real estate
jargon. We had already explored the notion that every discipline
and setting has its own jargon and vocabulary. Thus I was
able to connect this new topic to my overall syllabus. The
words generated from the mapping exercise included the following:
loan, bank, owe, lease, contract, security, deposit, mortgage,
deed, record, probate court, evict, multifamily, condominium,
commission, taxes (federal and state), and foreclosure.
The three students who own homes generated
most of these words based on their own experiences with
the housing market. One of these students in particular,
a Vietnamese woman named Ha, works in a bank and was familiar
with the bank’s role in the home-buying process. She
discussed her experience of buying her home in Dorchester
and contributed a lot of useful information to the discussion.
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