To celebrate Scotland’s national outdoor learning day, Ms Whorlow and Mrs Henry planned lots of fun activities to take place outdoors throughout the whole day. There were great links to numeracy and maths, literacy, technologies, science, social studies, art and much more!
P1-4 ventured in to the playground to play a huge game of battleships! They had to read co-ordinates on each other’s grids to try to sink each other’s battleships! They picked up co-ordinates quickly and were soon sinking the crafts!
Before lunch, P1-4 also went a walk down to the harbour for some imaginative writing. The used the beautiful setting in Portpatrick to describe what they could see, hear, touch, taste, smell, feel and then used this for inspiration for a story. In groups, the pupils created characters (some included an ‘evil mexican’, a ‘dragon’, a ‘royal sea pup’ and a unicorn!) and used their imaginations to create a story with an introduction, a problem then a solution to the problem. Lots of locals and visitors in the village enjoyed listening in to all these wonderful ideas and commented on how well the children were engaged in their learning! The class then wrote up their stories once back at school after lunch before ending their outdoor learning outside with Mrs Edwards, our PE specialist for some fun with patterns and skipping!
In p5/6, they focused on identifying angles within their environment. They had to find compass point bearings for local land marks and made birds eye view sketches of these from their excellent elevated view from the playground. They also marked out compass points using cones and recorded the angles.
After this, to link in with their current Science topic on ‘Plants’, the children went around their environment observing the variety of flowers on show. They also used magnifying glasses to observe the different insects who travel to these flowers which led to great discussion on food chains. The magnified view allowed the children to view the intricate details of leaves and the components of flowers e.g. petal, leaves, stem, anther, stigma etc.
The learners then used what they had observed to create intricate sketch drawings of the flower, really focusing on attention to detail. This provided opportunities to discuss symmetry and compare and contrast features of flowers and plants.
In the afternoon, the class ventured in to their local village to explore which areas provide rich tourism for the local community. They visited the putting green, family play park, local walking paths, fishing trips, golf club, local restaurants and bars as well as the beautiful sandy beach and rocky cliffs. For being a wee village… Portpatrick certainly has a lot to offer the rest of the world! 🙂
On their way back to school, p5/6 bumped int o p1-4 who were out collecting data on the locals and visitors favourite things. They questioned passer by’s appropriately then recorded their responses in a table and used tally marks to record totals. They will turn this information in to a graphical display next week!
We were so lucky to have 2 gorgeous sunny days to extend the outdoor learning 🙂
