All posts by Mrs Kelly

Leaf observations and symmetry on National Outdoor Classroom Day

“Outdoor Classroom Day is a global movement to make time outdoors part of every child’s day. On two days of action each year, teachers take children outdoors to play and learn.”

We are so fortunate here in Mearns that part of our school improvement plan is encouraging teachers to take children out EVERY day!

Today we had a marvellous time observing and recording details about leaves that we found.  We took part in some activities to help us understand the importance of recording clearly and observing closely.

We then enjoyed working in teams to produce some really creative symmetrical patterns. What a lot of learning went on as we worked together, chatting and excitedly creating them.

Marking maps

The weather held us back a bit today as we learned more about reading maps, using keys and orienteering, but we still had lots of fun! 😊

After the soggy map work, we created some amazing patterns using the array of beautifully coloured leaves we found at the back of the pitch.

We discovered some leaves which had what we think are little caterpillar eggs on them too. What an interesting and surprising discovery.

 

Analysing our pressed flowers

We are so pleased with our pressed flowers. After only two weeks in our hi tech flower presses the results were superb. What an interesting time we had this morning looking at our flowers and leaves on the light box.

Problem solving in the cold!

This morning we were challenged to collect six number stones to create three two digit numbers giving the highest total possible.

What marvellous discussions we had throughout the challenge as well as on the way back to class! We are certainly sharpening up our mental maths and problem solving skills in primary 4.

 

After that we designed and made some really cool outdoor hi tech clipboards and headed out to collect some leaves and flowers to press over the October break.

Outdoor learning

Despite the heavy rain we enjoyed a fabulous morning outside playing some listening games and learning all about how to collect and organise different materials to represent different things on a map.

Here we are organising ourselves into a square to start off our lesson and here are some of our maps….fortunately we got some photos before they blew away!