Compass Directions

I recently taught this to a year 3 class and found it very successful.

We had covered the basic north, east, south and west. I put up four labels around the class (N, S, E and W) and proceeded to put down ‘buried treasure’, which was not buried at all, but was only accessible by negotiating a path around the tables from the carpet in straight lines.

One child had to follow the instructions given by others to reach the ‘treasure’, e.g. two steps south, four steps west etc. Even those whose attention it is usually hard to keep for more than 30 seconds were riveted.