School Treasure Hunt – Teach Your Children How To Use A Compass

                

                          (View Image Source)

Hello, steemian educators!! This is another lesson plan for Primary School.  

In this lesson we want to get our students involved with physics (teach them about magnets), improve their fine-motor skills (let them make a compass with simple materials) and promote team spirit (work in teams to reach a common goal). 

A great activity when teaching magnets is to make a compass with your students and explain how it works and how to use it. After you have completed with theory presentation in class, a fun and educational activity would be to organize a treasure hunt where the children can only use the compasses they make in the classroom. As you can see, we want to make our students use the knowledge they get from school in practice and not just use it, but enjoy themselves in the process.

WHAT WE NEED: 

bowls of water
needles - sewing pins
magnets
craft foam, cork, or paper cut in small pieces
maps of the schoolyard with written directions    

                       

                   (View Image Source)

PART 1 

We divide our classroom in groups of 4-5, depends on the number of students in class. 

We show them this tutorial video:

And then we help the children make their own compasses. We take a needle and stroke it across the magnet for quite a lot of times (30-40 maybe). Be careful to stroke it only in one direction if you want the needle to be magnetized. Then, we take a small piece of craft foam/cork/paper and place it on the top of the water-filled bowl, we try to put it in the center of the bowl. Finally, we place the needle on top of the floating craft foam/cork/paper and let it find the North and rest to make sure it got it right. We can use a real compass to compare its accuracy. 

After we’re done and checked if all the compasses work, it’s time to move on to the next and more exciting part… 

PART 2 

We let our students in the schoolyard for a very special treasure hunt. We give a map with written directions to each team. You must adapt the directions to your schoolyard. If the place does not work for this activity, see if you could visit your local park or playground. Any place works perfectly as long as your children are safe. You can use step-counting or (if you think your students can pull it off) length-measuring (for this one you’ll need to provide your students with measuring tapes).

Here is an example:
“Count 10 steps to the North, then 8 steps North-East, etc” or “Walk for 3 meters North, then 2 meters North-East, etc” 

The students then find a steady spot, table or bench, to place their compasses. One or two students are reading the instructions on the map and giving directions with the help of the compass and the rest of the team are searching for the hidden treasure.  

ALTERNATIVE:
If our class has a lot of students and searching for the same treasure would be difficult, we could give a different treasure and treasure map to each team and let the winner be the one who finds theirs first.      

References:

kidsactivitiesblog.com
livescience.com

  

Thank you for reading my post. I hope some of you will find it interesting and helpful. If any of you tries it with your class, I'd be happy to know how it worked out for you, so leave a comment anytime!

You are more than welcome to check my profile, @ruth-girl, you may find interesting stuff there like my series of posts on bizarre natural phenomena. 

Interested in science? Please, don't forget to check the @steemstem project, a community-driven project meant to promote well-written,  high-quality, STEM-related content (STEM as for Science, Technology,  Engineering and Mathematics). Join them in steemit.chat for more information.

And for those engaging with education, @steemiteducation is here to join all steemian educators in their common cause of making our job easier, more effective and more fun! 

Thank you for your time and as I like to say, 

Steem on and keep smiling, people! :)