Familiarization with Compass Directions

 Do your kids like looking at maps? How good are they at navigating? Do you help them to build mental maps? Here is an activity that you can do to become more comfortable with learning North, South, East, and West.

For this activity, I got out my compass and my chalk. I stood on a patio, facing North. I had the kids draw a line North/South. Then another East/West. Then we wrote the words North, South, East, West. 

Incidentally, this also turned into a great lesson in phonetic letter recognition. "North. What's that first sound? nnnnnnn. What letter is that? N!" By the time they were done with this exercise, they were great at identifying the letters N, S, E, and W.

Next we got out our rubber band rockets, stood in the middle, and shot them off in each direction. Here's where it gets fun - I didn't get a video of this part. We kept going faster and faster. I'd shout out a direction, and they'd try to get their rocket to fly in that direction. Then we'd do another, and another. Eventually we moved on to North East, North West, South East and South West. It was really fun to see them spinning around and around trying to remember which way was which.

Here are a couple of short videos that I took with our preschoolers as we enjoyed this activity

North, South, East, West! Learning Vectors is the Best!