Latitude And Longitude for Kids

How maps can help you?

Maps can help you in many ways. Imagine you’re in 1990 and there is no Google map application on your mobile. Now imagine that you’re travelling to Paris along with your friend and your friend gets lost.How you would find him? You can find him easily on the map if you know the latitude and longitude of his location.

What is Longitude and Latitude?

Latitude and longitude are imaginary lines that can help you find the location of anywhere in the world on a map.It is used by every ship, every plane and even by Google map to locate places .

To understand these better, take a look at the globe. Find a picture of globe on internet and see closely. You would find that certain lines are drawn on the globe- some lines move from top to bottom and some lines are drawn from left to right. (in reality, there are no lines of these types on our earth , these were designed to help humans to understand locations of different places).

The lines running from top to bottom on a globe are called longitude, and the sections running from side to side on a globe are known as latitude lines.

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You can define latitude as an invisible horizontal line that runs around the Earth from East to West. It begins at the Equator where its coordinates are 0°.

The Equator divides the Earth into the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.

The North Pole has the latitude coordinate of 90°N (North) and the South Pole has the latitude coordinate of 90°S (South).

Longitude can be defined as the invisible vertical line that runs around the Earth from North to South.

Longitude divides the globe into the Eastern and Western Hemispheres.

Latitude and longitude coordinates are written as decimals with up to 4 decimal places to make sure they are accurate. For example, London is 51.5074° N, 0.1278° W.

In this video, kids can easily see many of the things discussed above and can learn about the longitude and latitude in a very easy manner. Teachers can teach about longitude and latitude to students in a fun way.

Activity: You can ask kids to go to google and find the latitude and longitude of the place you live.

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