Homemade control flags and clue sheets that children can actually read

Sewing the flags

A real control flag is three squares of cloth joined into a triangular prism, each square split diagonally into a white half and an orange half. Ours follow the same pattern at a smaller size, twenty centimetres a side instead of thirty, because they were cut from an old orange rain jacket and a white bedsheet and that was all the jacket allowed. A frame of three bent wire coat hangers keeps the prism open, and a loop of cord at the top ties round a branch.

In the Kurtuvėnai clearings and along the field margins there is often nothing to tie a flag to, so half the set hangs from short garden canes instead, pushed into the ground at a slight angle with a peg of wire to stop the flag spinning. The canes are painted dark green, which sounds contrary but means the flag itself is the only bright thing at the spot. Children look for orange, and a pale cane standing in a clearing would catch their eye before the flag did.

We made twenty in the first batch and lost two in the first season, both in the same forest, where a flag hung too low became something a dog carried off with great pride. The replacements have a strip of reflective tape along the bottom, which also makes them usable at night. Each flag has a code painted in black on white tape on one face, from 31 upwards, because low numbers are too easily confused with the order of controls on a course.

Proving you were there

Proper events use electronic chips, and older ones used needle punches that stamped a pattern of holes into a card. We started with neither. Each of our flags carries a small plastic bag with a crayon of a particular colour tied inside, and the children mark the matching box on their card with it. It works, it costs nothing, and it has one weakness, which is that crayons snap in frost. From November the bags hold small rubber letter stamps instead.

Some of us would like needle punches eventually, but nobody has really missed them. What matters for the children is the moment of arrival: finding the flag, checking the code against the clue sheet, marking the card and setting off again. For the adults, the card at the end shows where somebody went wrong. A card with the right colours in the wrong boxes belongs to a child who read the map well and the clue sheet badly, which is a different lesson altogether.

Clues a child can read

Orienteering events describe each control with a row of small pictograms: the code, the feature, which side of it the flag hangs, and so on. The system is compact and clever and means nothing at all to an eight-year-old. Our clue sheets use words in the same order, one line per control: the number, the code, what the feature is and where on it the flag hangs. A line reads 3, code 44, boulder, east side, rather than a row of symbols.

We added the pictograms slowly, one at a time, printed beside the words. Knoll and path junction came first, then ditch, marsh and clearing, then the harder ones like re-entrant and spur. By the end of the second year the older children read the symbol column first and glanced at the words only when unsure, which is the right way round. The youngest still read every word aloud to whoever is walking with them, which is also perfectly fine.

Hanging, checking and collecting

Whoever sets the course hangs the flags on the morning of the walk, never the day before, because flags left overnight near paths tend to wander. Each one hangs at knee height for small children and shoulder height for older courses, exactly where the clue sheet says, and visible from a few metres away once you are standing at the right feature. A flag that can be seen from a hundred metres away is a flag that teaches nothing.

A second adult walks the course before the children start, checking every code against the clue sheet, and that check has caught a wrong flag or a wrong side on most Sundays. Afterwards the same two people collect everything, ticking each code off on a list that lives in the flag box. More than once we have gone back into a forest at dusk for a single missing flag. The rule that everything comes home the same day matters more than any course.