Children's art practices are valuable tools for arts integration across disciplines, particularly in early childhood and elementary education, where they can be effectively utilized in various subjects and classrooms. Adopting the pedagogy of multiliteracies alongside empirical methods as a form of art practice as research, this study explores how children articulate their thoughts and feelings through mapping. It examines the value of employing a multiliteracy approach to analyzing children's mapping and the implications of employing a new materialism framework to explore and contextualize young children's visual representations in art and literacy. Using ethnographic tools, the author conducted year-long regular classroom observations in two public elementary schools (in South Korea and the United States), visiting two to three times per week for 180 to 240 minutes per session. The findings suggest that mapping serves as a valuable pedagogical tool in art education, emphasizing the relationship between people, materials, memory, and identity from the frameworks of multiliteracy and new materialism.