Unit Study: Ancient Polynesian Wayfinding

In the animated Disney movie Moana, Moana learns the lost art of to wayfinding from demigod Maui to navigate across the ocean and restore the heart of Te Fiti and save her island. However, they do not use a compass, map, or even a GPS to navigate, they use the sun, stars, and sea to guide them. Moana learning wayfinding is a tribute to the real life almost-lost art of ancient Polynesian wayfinding that allowed the Polynesian people to sail across the open ocean and discover thousands of islands that are thousands of miles apart. There has been a cultural reawakening to the powerful ancient method of wayfinding through projects like the Hōkūle’a, they used a boat modeled after ancient boats and used ancient navegational methods to sail around the world.

To learn about ancient Polynesian wayfinding in our class, we used a few circle time activities to help my daughter understand some of how Moana and the ancient polynesians used nature to wayfind across the ocean. Below are the Objectives, Background, Materials, and Activities we used.

Learning Objective

Polynesian Wayfiders would use the Sun, Moon, Stars, ocean swells, and wildlife to navigate the open ocean from island to island.

Background

Here are some resources that helped me gain some background before talking about wayfinding with my children.

I picked the first video to show my 4 yo daughter so she could see that people can navigate using nature like Moana in real life.

Here is a blog by another mom who was teaching wayfinding to her children as well.

Supplies:

Visual aids printed or saved to phone/tablet such as this image below.
Bed sheet to demonstrate waves
Eye covering: Bandana, sleeping mask, etc.
Sundial supplies: Chalk, person, and side walk or marker, stick, and paper plate.
Constellation supplies:
- Black paper, white crayons/chalk, star stickers or toothpicks

Circle time demonstrations/activities

(Target age: 3-6 yo)

Play Marco Polo

Play Marco polo (cautiously) in an empty space like a cleared out living room. You can ask the kids to cover their eyes or use an eye covering like a scarf, bandana, or sleeping mask.

Talk about how it is hard to find something without being able to see where you are going.

Discuss: What did the Polynesians have to look at in the open ocean?

They didn’t have land marks.

Share that the Polynesian Wayfiders would use the Sun, Moon, Stars, ocean swells, and wildlife to navigate the open ocean from island to island.

Illustration by Hannah Hillam for BYU Magazine article

Watch an educational video…or two.

At this point, we watched one of the youtube background videos posted above as well as the portion of the Moana movie where Moana learns that her people used to be wayfinding voyagers - “Opetaia Foa’i - We Know The Way.”

At the end of the Moana clip, we discussed when we saw them use different Polynesian navigational tools. We used the image above as a visual.

During this discussion we reiterated that Polynesian Wayfiders use the Sun, Moon, Stars, ocean swells, and wildlife to navigate the open ocean from island to island.

Demonstrations/Activities

After discussing different Polynesian navigational methods, we used several activities to better experience how the Polynesian wayfinders used these natural elements to navigate.

Wildlife: For this one, we didn’t do much. We did however point out how the wayfinder in the “We know the way” video clip followed the white tern bird to find land.

Waves/Swells: Waves in the ocean follow consistent patterns. Wayfinders watched these ocean swells or waves to keep track of which direction they were going.

Hands-on visual: Bed sheet swells

Take a flat bed sheet and make waves as a visual. Take turns having one person shake the sheet up and down and talk about how the waves are coming from one direction. This is how the Polynesians used the swells. They knew which way the waves came from and could use them to orient their boat in the right direction for where they wanted to go. Let everyone make waves, then use the sheet for parachute activities: hold the sheet up high and down low, then shake it fast and slow, and you can even have everyone lift it up then run under it.

Sun/Moon – Because of how the earth rotates, we see the sun rise in the east and set in the west. Discuss which side of the house you see the sunrise and which side of the house you see the sunset and how it always happens that way. The moon follows the same path. It rises in the east and sets in the west.

Related activities you can do later:

- Make a human shadow sundial

https://rhythmsofplay.com/human-sundial-shadow-science-experiment/

- Make a paper plate sundial.

https://theresjustonemommy.com/paper-plate-sundial-stem-activity/

Stars – The stars follow the same path, they rise in the east and set in the west. Instead of using the physical compass to find north like we can, wayfinders used a star compass. They would memorize more than 200 stars and where they rise and set along the horizon (Show visual, below). They used constellations, or pictures in the stars with stories, to help them remember the stars in the sky.

Hands on visual activities:

- Tape different constellations on the wall at different heights then use your hands like Moana when she was “high fiving the sky” to identify which ones are highest and lowest.

- Play dot to dot to find constellations:

- Draw your own constellations, using white crayons on black paper and star stickers. Alternatively, you can use toothpicks to poke holes for stars, then hang your paper up on a window to see the sun shine through and light up the stars.

Here are our constellations that we made. My 4 y.o. drew her own picture and put star stickers on the picture to make it a constellation. My 18 m.o. liked sticking stars to the paper so I helped her get the stars. Their final pictures are pictured below them. On the right two pictures are constellations that I made, the top one is by poking toothpicks into the paper to make the big dipper and the bottom one was drawn with yellow and white crayon.

With these activities, we accomplished the following learning goals:

Introduction to using nature around us to know where we are and where we are going.

Gross motor skills by using the sheet to make waves

Fine motor skills by drawing constellations and sticking stickers

Science to observe the rotation of the earth by making sundials

Numeral recognition by doing a dot-to-dot constellation

Math by describing constellations as higher or lower using

Exploring how a different culture does things

Fulfilling curious minds when they ask, “Why does Moana do like this?” (with hand in the air)

I hope that you found something useful in these activities that can help you explore and celebrate Polynesian Navigation.