Compass Rose and Cardinal Directions: Finding North, Wren and Sitka, Grades 3-5
People crossed oceans for thousands of years with no compass and no map app. The important part of how they did it takes about five minutes to learn, and your child can do it tonight from the back step.
By the end of this
- Your child can find north at night from the Big Dipper, and say why a dim star beats a bright one
Your child is ready for this if they
- Reads a short paragraph without help
- Writes a sentence in their own words
- Will go outside and look at something for five minutes
That list matters more than the age we printed on it. You know which of the two is true of your child.
Almost every star appears to move across the sky through the night, because Earth is turning. One star barely moves at all. That is Polaris, the North Star, and it sits almost exactly above the North Pole.
Find it and you have found north, which means you also have east, south, and west.
To find it, look for the Big Dipper, which is a saucepan shape of seven bright stars. Take the two stars at the outer edge of the pan, away from the handle. Draw an imaginary line up from them about five times the gap between them, and you land on Polaris.
Polaris is not especially bright, which surprises people. Its usefulness is that it stays put.
In the daytime the sun does the same job roughly. It rises in the east and sets in the west, and at midday it sits due south if you are north of the tropics.
What is inside
- 01Finding North Without a Compass — the teaching page
- 02Finding North Without a Compass — the work page, answerable from the teaching page
- 03Take it outside: On the next clear night, find the Big Dipper and use the pointer stars to find Polaris.
Standards alignment, for a portfolio or a state filing
2 alignments. Copy what your state asks for and ignore the rest — this is here for the paperwork, not for the teaching.
| Framework | Code | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| NGSS | 5-ESS1-2 | |
| NGSS | SEP-4 |