Orienteering - the fundamentals

stuart payne Posted: 25 October 2001, 2:01 AM   My problem with the Kiwisport manual is it doesn't begin with what I will call REAL orienteering. That is cross-country orienteering. I believe, the manual should begin by describing true orienteering - an outdoor sport, croos-country with a map. It should then emphasise the basic skills that this requires, viz. understanding a map, eg map legend and ability to set (orient) the map. The best place to start outdoors is the schoolground, but after describing schoolground exercises there should be a progression to park to cross-country terrain. We want children to quickly experience what real orienteering is about. Desktop and classroom exercises don't do this. If a child experiences a few of these, then never has another kiwi-O experience, what sort of image of kiwisport do they have? While desktop and classroom exercises are useful to develop awareness of how maps work and how mapping is done, our push should be to get them into the core mathematics syllabus (if not already there) not present them as part of kiwiSPORT. We should be about SPORT first and foremost. We should be presenting a faithfull image of orienteering from the word go.