Just for practice, I took a map and a compass and tried to explain to an 8 year old how to navigate in the woods on a compass heading. I didn’t pick our azimuth based on our actual starting point, so we missed our target by a couple hundred feet, but I wasn’t really trying for perfect execution as much as I was trying to teach the basic idea of selecting an object in the distance using the compass with a known heading, hiking to it, then selecting the next target.
Honestly, it was probably a good exercise for me, in that I fumbled around a bit with the map, figuring out how to set our direction. I haven’t done that in a long time. I also had to look up our local declination because, here to fore, the compass always seemed to point pretty close to north and I had no real need for greater accuracy. Generally, my target will be a road or something else that I cannot miss, and I am more interested in taking the path of least resistance than I am in staying on an exact heading. Also, sometimes I just use my compass to correct for my natural tendency to walk in circles at night.
Anyway, our local declination is about 10 degrees west. You can look it up from your latitude and longitude at the NCEI website (and others). That means you add 10 degrees to a map heading to get your compass heading (magnetic north).
Would anyone be interested in a one hour orienteering class, where we can learn how to use our compasses to find our way to where we are going? I’d be happy to head such a class.