Drills for children: star courses, line walks and a thumb on the map

Setting the map and keeping a thumb on it

Everything starts with holding the map so that it matches the ground. We call it setting the map: if the path in front of you runs away from you, the path on the map should too. The youngest learn it in a school playground with a hand-drawn plan, turning the paper every time they turn their body, and walking round the building until the habit sticks. Children who hold the map still while they turn get lost within a minute, every time.

The second habit is the thumb. Fold the map small and keep your thumb on the spot where you are standing, moving it along as you walk. It sounds too simple to matter. It is the difference between glancing down and knowing where to look, and glancing down and searching the whole sheet. We check thumbs the way other parents check shoelaces, and by the second summer the children had started checking ours, with some satisfaction.

Star courses from a single base

A star course has one base, usually a picnic blanket in a clearing, and a ring of flags within a couple of hundred metres. Each child gets a map with one flag marked, goes out, finds it, comes back and gets the next map. Nobody is ever far away, the adults can see the base from most flags, and a child who gets lost has only a short way to come back. It is the best format we have found for the under-tens.

The legs get harder as the morning goes on. The first flags hang on paths, the next on obvious features just off them, and the last ones deliberately need a turn or two of the map to reach. Children who finish quickly get a flag marked on the far side of the ring, which means crossing the whole circle. The ones who find it hard get a parent to shadow them at twenty paces, silent unless asked.

Line walks and corridors

For children who have outgrown star courses we draw a line on the map, winding along paths, round a marsh and across a clearing, and ask them to follow it exactly. Flags hang somewhere along the real line, and each time a child finds one they mark on their map where they think it was. At the end we compare their marks with where the flags actually hung. Children who drifted off the line know it already, because they missed flags.

A corridor is the same idea with most of the map hidden. We cut away everything except a strip fifty metres wide either side of the route, so the child sees only the ground close to the line. It forces attention onto nearby detail, the ditch crossing, the bend, the change from pine to birch, instead of the big picture. Our older two complain that it feels like walking in blinkers, which is more or less the point of it.

The line walk teaches the adults something as well. When a child misses a flag, the natural reaction is to go and show them where it is. It is better to walk back together to the last flag they found and ask what the map said next. Most of the time they see the mistake before we have to say anything, and a mistake a child finds for themselves is worth ten that are pointed out.

Keeping it short, and keeping it safe

Twenty minutes of concentrated map reading is plenty for a seven-year-old, and forty for a ten-year-old. After that the lessons stop sinking in and the snacks become the main event. We finish every drill while the children still want another, then play hide and seek or build dens, which keeps the whole day happy and the drill a small, good part of it. Nobody has ever been made to finish a course, and nobody has asked to stop coming.

The forests near the city are safe in the everyday sense, but they are also tick country. Lithuania has one of the highest rates of tick-borne encephalitis in Europe, and most of our families have had the vaccine. Every child wears long trousers tucked into socks from April to October and is checked at home the same evening, behind the knees and along the hairline. We also keep a list of who is out on the course and tick each name back in at the base.