Note
Did a program at Friends School Haverford. A former student of mine teaches there. I made a map of their school grounds which has enough land and gardens and play areas and even a cemetery to make it interesting. Put out 12 controls.
First worked with a dozen or so 3rd/4th graders just letting them run around finding controls using the map or not, finding as many as they wanted or as few. If they wanted more, I gave them an index card with 3 random control numbers and challenged them to go find just those. I had a whole pile of index cards and they could repeat as often as they wanted. And finally I had 2 courses that they could do each with 6 of the controls.
After about 45 minutes the 1st/2nd graders came out and I gave them the same options. Several of the 3rd/4th graders kept wanting to do more and a handful kept running around doing new index card courses for about 90 minutes. A few of the 1st/2nd graders got into it as well although they were mostly just running to controls and not looking at the map so much.
Then all the 1st - 4th graders went inside and about 30 5th - 8th graders came. Luckily they came in small groups at first and I would get one group going before the next came. They were told they "had" to do this activity and very few got excited by it. However, they were much better at looking at the map and knowing where the controls were going to be. Only two of the older kids wanted to try a course after going around finding random controls. One girl tried to talk her friends into doing a course but they wouldn't. She finally decided to just do it on her own. Yay!
The teachers thought it was great and I left a pile of maps with the DVOA web address. I encouraged them to let the kids take a map home and perhaps a few of the kids that really liked it will talk their parents into bringing them to an event in the future.
I originally wanted to do this as part of WOD but it got postponed twice for various reasons. Glad we were finally able to do it.