A Map Reading Session

I had offered to teach an evening of map reading with the local training ship of the Nautical Training Corps. This had come about after leading them on an evening walk from Woodingdean to Rottingdean windmill during the summer, with them carrying maps, and me explaining what we were seeing along the way, such as a local trig point and tumuli and the windmill itself, on Beacon Hill.

The cadets range from 8 to 15 years old, so I was aware that some children might not have looked at map before, but there would also be some who could identify features such as contour lines. We split into two groups, with the juniors (8 to 11 years old) first, and then the seniors.

I started off with an A3 map of the counties (“administrative boundaries”) of Great Britain, printed off from the Ordnance Survey website. I was curious to see how many cadets could tell me where Brighton was. If we rule out the comedy guesses around Inverness and Aberdeen, there were still a range of dots from Kent to Dorset. I was relieved to see that all but one of the seniors placed dots on the south coast at least.

I then got out the Explorer map and we took a look at the features. I had downloaded the flash cards from the OS website and laminated them, so we went through a few of them and, for comedy value, looked at the multiple cycling features, which I glossed as bike hire, cycle route, mountain bike trail and broken bike (craft centre). Nobody knew what the craft centre symbol was supposed to be. When I showed them a photo of an old woman with a spinning wheel, two of the 20 cadets managed to identify it, which surprised me, given that no one has used one for nearly 200 years.

I showed them how to produce a grid reference for a place to the nearest hundred metres, using the 1km map squares and some Romers on tracing paper that I’d hastily printed, and then the cadets were split into groups of 2 or 3, with their own map, and they attempted to answer questions about points on the map that I’d identified with grid references.

All of the cadets were managing to find the locations on the map and enjoyed using the legend on the map to identify other features as they came across them. Each of the sessions lasted about 40 minutes.

I was pleased how this session worked. Although I had lots of ideas and prepared facts, it was useful to restrict the session to small chunks of discovery, discussion, new skill and practice. I had spent a lot of time exploring the map myself, before deciding on the quiz questions and that paid off too, as I could answer a lot of questions about discovered features on the fly.