My students keep track of places they have "visited" in their reading by marking our United States map bulletin board.

Both fiction and nonfiction texts work perfectly for this activity. It’s also a great way to integrate reading with social studies. Since we study regions in my 3rd grade classroom, we even graph the number of places we’ve visited in each region at the end of each month to see which region has attracted the most readers to date.

What a fun, interactive way to promote reading and to heighten students’ knowledge of United States geography!