Measuring and constructing bearings

By | 22nd March 2019

Get the PowerPoint here.

Get the worksheet as a Word file or PDF file.

Bearings is one of those difficult topics to teach, I think. Even though it’s reasonable easy.

I’ve done a lesson here concentrating on just measuring and constructing. No calculation at all. I’m going to put that in a separate lesson.

Which means you’re going to have to print out the example problem pair 🙁

Starts with a little discussion on if something could be a bearing or not.


Goes onto a worksheet on measuring.

I suppose I should have really presented an example with angles labeled and asked them to pick out the right bearing (like the exam question at the end of this PowerPoint) but I think I wanted to add that in next lesson.

Then some whiteboard work on the compass.


Then some construction questions.

My example problem pair here includes animations. I kind of hate it. I’ve really tried to move on from ‘clicking’. If you’ve downloaded my PowerPoint in the past you might have noticed that I’ve deleted a lot of stuff. I used to have animated multi-step solutions and examples. Indeed some of my older, non-updated PowerPoints still have that stuff. I really regret that now. I know it’s a crutch, and can be helpful in ‘scripting’ but I think kids need to see you WRITING and doing the calculation yourself (I use the pen tool in PowerPoint).

But there wasn’t a real way to get around using animations here, unless you have a visualizer. If you do, do that!

One thought on “Measuring and constructing bearings

  1. Pingback: Calculating bearings – TickTockMaths

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