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Weather
Today was a lot colder as the temperature had dropped to 7 - 8 degrees celsius. Stayed sunny and dry throughout the day.
Goals for today
The goals for today were to become familiar with all the skills of orienteering as well as all the teaching techniques of orienteering. Another personal goal for me was to try and stay alert and not fall asleep as orienteering was probably bottom of my list activity wise.
Session Evaluation
Today Geo met us in the board room upstairs in GMIT. He began by telling us about his role within the orienteering association of Ireland and how everything is run. We then went straight into learning about the different teaching techniques.
Firstly Geo split the class into two groups. The first activity he did with us was a map jigsaw. Here he gave each team a cut up map and told us to race to put it together. This was a good way of getting us re-familiarised with orienteering maps.
Straight away after this Geo did a symbol recognition activity with us which I thought he ran extremely well. He set up a flip chart at the other end of the room with symbols on it and we had to run one by one up to the chart, take a symbol, bring it back and match it with the words on the ground. I think Geo ran this very well as even though the two teams were getting some wrong, he made us sort it out ourselves rather than fixing it for us.
The next game that he ran with us was a map memory exercise. Here we had a sheet with 1 - 10 and we had to go from one end of the room to the other matching the map pieces up on the sheet without actually taking them off the wall. This was an excellent game as it made you really remember certain symbols and features on the map.
We then had a lunch break but when we came back we looked at maps and control cards. Here Geo showed us how to use a map properly and also how to fill in a control card properly also.
After this we went straight into learning about the different types of orienteering event that can be run such as 'star, cross country and score'. We then ran each of these competitively amongst the class around the college.
After this Geo had a de-brief with us in the canteen and told us each to take an aspect of teaching orienteering and teach the class that aspect next Tuesday but it wasn't allowed to be the same way as he had thought that aspect.
Evaluation of Goals
Today we went through all the aspects of orienteering as well as how to teach all of these aspects also.
Before I did this I was unbelievably apprehensive about it and I even felt like not going in to college as any previous experience I had with orienteering was a bad/BORING one. However I am absolutely shocked about how much fun I had today and how much interest I had also. There was such a massive change in my mood from the morning to the evening. I ended up coming home and checking online to see if there were any upcoming events the following weekend.
I would definitely recommend everyone to do this course.
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