When teaching geography to students in the primary grades, teachers should provide firsthand experiences that young children need to make meaningful sense of their world. David Sobel, author of "Mapmaking with Children: Sense of Place Education for the Elementary Years," suggests that teachers in the early grades adopt a small-world approach to teaching geography, whereby instruction is designed to help students understand the geography that is closest to them. This article presents a unit of study in which a small-world approach to teaching geography is achieved by engaging young learners in a series of "sense of place" activities related to their local environment. This unit of study moves through the four stages of a "learning cycle": (1) engagement; (2) investigation; (3) reflection; and (4) explanation/clarification. Students are involved in creating two different kinds of graphic representations of what they are learning: individual students create a four-part "report" with words and drawings, and small groups create diorama maps. The students also hear a fictional narrative and relate it to a map-like diorama, and then take an excursion in their school neighborhood. Basic skills are learned and practiced, such as representing aspects of the environment on paper and deciding what features to record and emphasize. (Contains 1 figure and 4 notes.)