Joyful Socks Mom: Let's Navigate! How-To Make an Outdoor Compass: Outdoor Hour Challenge

3/13/13

Let's Navigate! How-To Make an Outdoor Compass: Outdoor Hour Challenge

The girls and I have been spending as much time as possible out of doors. This is a direct benefit of living in Texas during the end of winter and blossoming of Spring. Allergies aside, we have been exploring and nature studying to our hearts content beginning our spring break.

Here is a quick activity that we enjoyed this week during Nature Study: Make an outdoor stick compass.

This is the Bug's outdoor compass. She actually had to move her rocks around to the right position. But that was only after I took the picture, of course.

1. Use a the short stick that you found (already off the tree, no pulling off the tree directly) and push directly into the ground.

2. Now push the stick toward the sun, leaving it at a slight angle. The stick should not have any shadow. Now, you wait . . .

3. When your stick has projected a shadow of approximately 6 inches long or more, then you know that the shadow is pointing east directly from the stick.

4. Now you can use rocks, sticks to make a line at right angles across the shadow, making north and south. We painted our rocks, but chalk would work too.

HERE ARE SOME MORE OUTDOOR COMPASSES THAT WE LIKED: