Autumn red

Almost two weeks ago I attended the Growing Greener Conference which I blogged about recently. Thanks to that conference I have now been using outside my classroom as my classroom more often. Yes it’s November and it’s cold but that shouldn’t stop you taking your class outdoors for teaching and learning opportunities.

Today we did both our Maths and English outdoors. We went for a ‘magical story walk’ around the vegetable garden where we came across toadstools and fungi growing from the bark covered pathway. This led to the children talking about who might have lived there, what they might have looked like, what their lives were like and when we got back to class, brimming with ideas, everyone started writing their thoughts down. More on those during the week and the descriptions they came up with will appear here soon.

For our data handling activity in Maths, we grabbed some hoops from the PE store and set off to investigate leaf dispersal using the non-scientific ‘Throw a hoop and see what it finds for you’ method of investigation. It worked. The class used laptops as well as books to collect the data as you can see from the photos. Last week we also used leaves for graph work and Carroll diagrams both of which ended up producing a much better outcome than I had planned for.

So it may be November, cold and dark but grab a coat and get outside. It’s definitely a resource worth going out for.

Blog to look out for – I’m a teacher, get me OUTSIDE here