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Navigation
What's it all about
Navigation is all about knowing where you are, and then knowing how to get somewhere else without getting lost. There are all sorts of ways of doing this whether by day or by night, and most of them involve being observant.
First of all you need to know the name of the Street in which you live, and the names of the roads round about. By now you will probably also know the way to school, but if you are taken there by car, you will also need to know the way home again in case whoever takes you and brings you back can't make it for some reason. Observe the route, look for land marks that you can recognise - buildings, shops, pubs, road names and lots more.
Navigation is about being able to tell others the way, as well as get to places yourself, so learn your left and right, and be able to recognise useful distances so that you can tell others how to get to places that you know. Very long Beaver strides are about a metre, so find two telegraph poles, or lamp posts, and find out how far they are apart, and then you can use that distance to help you estimate how far things are away - this needs practice over various distances, but you can get quite good at it in time.
In Scouting, we also learn to read maps, and the first thing that we must do is be able to recognise the points of the compass. There is a compass above, and on it are marked what we call the cardinal points.
They are:
North - at the top
South - at the bottom
West - on the left
East - on the right, and that should help you remember your left and right.
Get someone to show you an Ordinance Survey map, scale 1:50,000. These are the most common maps used to help us get around, and when you open it out, you will find that North is traditionally at the top of the map. On the map you will easily spot roads and other features. At the bottom of the map, or at the side in some cases, you will find a section that tells you what all the little symbols on the map mean, and as you progress through scouting, you will learn what all these are, and they will help you to recognise where you are.
You will see a map on the right, above. See if you can spot a main road, a motorway, a canal, a railway line, a railway station, and a church. Also on the map, you will see some feint blue lines
running up and down, and across the map. We call these - grid lines, and they are provided by the map makers, 1 kilometer apart, which will give you some idea of distances.
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