Which way is the North Pole?

The small boy is very keen on anything to do with space at the moment, including his home planet!  He likes to look at a globe and find the UK and a few other countries where people we know live or are on holiday.  More recently, we've started to talk about the Arctic and Antarctic (and polar bears and penguins), and he likes to keep telling me that the North Pole is in the Arctic and the South Pole in the Antarctic.

When I suggested that we might find the North Pole tomorrow, he got quite excited.  I may have accidentally over-sold it, but he was still enthusiastic about the idea this morning.

He's already had a play with a couple of bar magnets, and seen that they have a north and a south pole. He has found that the north poles repel (push against) each other, as do the south poles, and that opposite poles move towards each other.

We made a big compass by floating a plastic plate in a washing up bowl of water so that it could spin freely. We put a bar magnet on the plate and the plate spun round to align the magnet with the Earth's magnetic field.  We confirmed that our DIY compass was right when I produced a real compass and it pointed the same way.

Improvised compass next to the real thing, pointing the same way

I explained that planet Earth was like a huge magnet. I told him that the north pole of the bar magnet points towards the Earth's North Pole (I didn't try and explain that the geographic and magnetic North aren't exactly the same...), and that we can use this to find our way around the planet. We did some pointing towards the Arctic and the Antarctic and I helped him figure out which way was East and which way was West. We talked a bit about where relatives live and which way we need to travel to get to them.

He then surprised me by wanting to find out what happened with the other magnet. I got it out and he found he could snap the two together into a big long magnet which still had a North and South and pointed the right way! 

The two magnet compass 

He enthusiastically told Daddy tonight which way he needs to go to find polar bears, so I think we may be making the big compass again soon.