Our warm up game today helped develop our word creating skills using vowels, consonants and golden question marks. We got into teams and collected stones with letters on them to work together making long words and short words. It was great when we picked golden question marks as they could be any letter we wanted! Team work was really important and all of us worked well on this task.
Next we used ‘Sammy snakes’ (who misbehaved a bit while Mrs Kelly held them! ) to help us work on our estimation skills. Finally we went exploring in the forest to find trees of all different heights and practised estimating just how tall they were.
click on this link to hear some estimation in action:
video of estimating
“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!
We started off today producing a magnificent whole class symmetrical creation! Isn’t it amazing? Such attention to detail. Everyone really enjoyed taking part in producing it.
We continued using our time outdoors by selecting and observing our chosen leaves before taking time to record our observations using our fabulous hi tech clip boards 😊 We then took part in some activities to test our recording skills and learned a lot discussing with each other what we had done well and what we could work on.
We spent some time outside collecting leaves and making patterns with them on the grass, but the weather just got a little too blustery, so we decided to bring our leaves inside to continue making some beautiful patterns.
What an interesting afternoon we had checking out our pressed flowers on a light box. We talked lots about what had happened to the flowers as they were pressed over the last two weeks and had great conversations about the petals and leaves becoming more translucent and fascinating to look at too.
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The strange weather this afternoon meant we spent some time indoors making fabulous hi tech clip board flower presses (HTCBFP for short!) which we will use for outdoor learning in the future. We did manage to get outonce the torrential rain stopped to collect some pieces of nature to press. We will have a look at them once we are back to school after the October break.
We worked in teams using rainbow sticks today to revise place value and do a bit of problem solving at the same time by making the largest and smallest numbers we could as well as working out how many different numbers we could make with a given number of sticks.
After that we investigated 2D shapes by making them out of different materials and discussing their properties.
We learned today all about how to record routes on maps and listen to instructions on how to follow routes on maps. Turning the map to hold it the correct way by matching North on the map to the direction of North on our courses really helped us.
We were fortunate that the rain stayed off for us this afternoon and we managed to stay dry as we learned (although there were some muddy feet as the grass certainly wasn’t dry after this morning’s heavy rain!)
We got ourselves into a triangle to play some fun listening warm up games before moving on to our main learning activity for the day.
Learning how to work well in a small team to plan, collect items and create maps was a great success. Here are some of our maps, can you see how we used different natural materials to represent different areas of our school grounds?
Just another blogs.glowscotland.org.uk – East Renfrewshire site
