Outdoor learning

Outdoor music fun

What a beautiful day to enjoy making music outside. We learned all about the beat of music and how rhythms fit into that beat. Today we learned “ta” and “te te”.

Outdoor number creating and exchanging

Even though our morning’s weather was quite dull we enjoyed brightness in our mood as we worked through our activities for the morning.

We started off getting ourselves into the shape of a triangle and playing a game to practise counting in threes.

Moving on to investigating place value and how to say larger numbers using some number stones.

Before collecting buttercups and playing an exchanging game in teams aiming to build a buttercup tree! We didn’t quite get it completed, so we will definitely play it again next week.

Colour matching and creating flowers

We had a great session outside in the dry but cool morning today. Colour analysis and matching was our first activity. We discussed the colours we found in great detail and it was so interesting to talk to each other about all the different shades while we compared them to colours on our magazines.

After playtime we went back out and studied some flowers before painting our very own, using daisies as natural paintbrushes.

Making mini beasts outside

What a glorious morning of weather we had for our outdoor learning session today!

We studied some plants carefully, looking at their leaves, buds, seeds and flowers. We carefully selected some of them to use to create our very own mini beasts to take home!

Mini beast hunting and studying

We started out our lesson today sharing our current knowledge of mini beasts, and we came up with quite a list of names!

After that we went off in pairs to try and find some and think about where they choose to live and why. There was lots of fabulous chat about many of them liking the dark, under stones and rotting wood and how some seem to like sitting on dandelions. We even dug up some grass and soil to investigate and try to answer Adam’s question about how deep worms go.

Unfortunately the rain came on really heavily, so we decided to go back indoors…we took our mini beasts with us as decided to create some labelled diagrams after analysing them under a microscope.

Adjective adventures

Today we were lucky with the weather, the drizzly rain stayed away for us and we were dry for our morning of adjective adventures.

Here are some photos of us working and playing together developing our descriptive language skills.

Outdoor number grouping

Today was dry but chilly for most of our time outdoors, so we were glad we took out our jackets just incase. 😊

We organised ourselves into the months of our birthdays to start off today. Knowing important facts like the date and month we were born in is really helpful when we are playing games to organise ourselves, just like knowing where our name comes in the alphabet, it’s good to know when our birthdays come in the year.

Using different strategies like ‘friends of ten’ and ‘double numbers’ is useful when we are adding lots of numbers together. So we practised doing this today in our teams using stones. Here are some photographs of us working together doing just that.

And here are two great videos of Sam and Mayar explaining how to group numbers together to make it easier to work out the total of all the numbers given.

Symmetry all around us

We started off our outdoor session today doing a friends of ten hunt….a bit like an Easter egg hunt, but with numbers instead of eggs! We all had great fun playing this and were exhausted after we had played it quite a few times!

Next, we spent some time looking at abject outside and deciding if they were symmetrical or not before creating our own superb symmetrical patterns using natural materials we found outside.

We also spotted some really interesting little crawling creatures. They moved around too much to be able to tell if they were symmetrical though!

Triangles and Friends of Ten

The weather was chilly and drizzly this morning but it didn’t dampen our spirits as we went on a triangle hunt and organised ourselves into a triangle before we started our other activities.

We were learning today about ‘friends of ten’ , that’s two numbers that add together to make ten. This is a really important part of numeracy and we all have to learn these facts so we know the pairs without even having to think about it! Here are some photos of us playing and working on remembering the facts.

A great outdoor learning session was had by all today in the sun. After organising ourselves into the shape of a square we played some warm up games focusing on listening and watching before heading off to explore the school grounds.

We learned all about keeping safe and making decisions to make sure we are never at high risk of being hurt or finding ourselves in a dangerous situation.

After that, we had fun making squares out of sticks remembering that a square must have four equal sides and four right angles.

Here are some photos of our day.