Tag: Tong School

Training for Nursery Staff

Since Tim has come back from doing the Forest Kindergarten Training he has been working with the Early Years team to help them develop their skills.

He ran a pilot course with the combined nursery staff in Tong school and will be running a trainer course in November 2019.

Although the course is called forest it is not just aimed at forests, the training is aimed at helping early years practitioners to take the young people they work with outside more regularly.

The model used is to consider the Place, the People and the Pedagogy;

Considering the Place involves the suitability and the practical steps needed to manage the young people in the place.

The People thinks about who is involved; the young people, the staff, the carers/parents managing their needs and expectations.

Pedagogy is the how what and why we take young people outdoors

A possible visual model:

The objective it to show practitioners the connectivity and to challenge them to consider the elements in their own practice.

This is partly done inside through conversation, which because of time constraints is done inside.

The final session on pedagogy was done outside in the fantastic garden area of the school. The practitioners were given opportunity to play. This, apart from being great fun in the rain, highlighted for this group the importance of child lead learning and how few resources they needed as the environment provides them. They saw imaginative play, social skills development, gross motor skills, fine motor skills and peer learning happen within their own group and considered how they could use this in their own practice.

Small world play

 

 

 

 

Exploring the Moor with Tong School

The class were doing a project on black houses and wanted to look at and explore the moor behind the school. Tim first looked round the village to see if there were the remains of any black houses on the crofts but sadly in Tong he couldn’t find any, so the decision was to have a walk out onto the moor, look at how it was different to the rest of the village and how the land might be being used.

The class used the Outdoor Journeys model developed by Simon Beames at Edinburgh University as a start point to prepare. Tim went into the class and they looked at the map and discussed the potential hazards, wrote this out before completing their journey plan to be left a the school before they set off. (Here are the CnES versions of the documents; Journey Plan, Hazard Assessment)

The walk went out of the school up the road, left out towards Craignish and the followed the peat tracks past the fank to the 42m high point. Then before turning to head for the wind turbine and then back down Barraidmhicille Mhoire to the school.

It was a very frosty afternoon so frozen puddles were a great source of interest with everyone looking at the ice and then jumping on it to smash it.

As part of the project to look at how people lived in black houses the class learnt the song Eilean Fraoich, they thought it would be good if they stood on top of some peat banks and sang the song.

On the way round the moor the class looked at the plants and birds they saw, it was so cold they came to the conclusion that was why they didn’t see many birds apart from seagulls.

The cold wasn’t bothering the cattle we  saw near to the end of the journey.

The journey ended back a the school and the inevitable ‘wellies off scrum’ and lots of smiling faces.

Tong School Visit to Arnish Gun Emplacements

Just before the end of the school term, as part of the project on the wars and into the Iolaire disaster, a trip to the gun emplacements at Arish Point was organised by Tong School. Tim went along to help and tell a few stories.

The bus dropped the classes at the carpark below the Bonny Prince Charlie cairn and they walked along to the emplacements.

The ruins of the emplacements gave a great opportunity to explore and to talk about what it must have been like to be based there on a wild winter night. We also looked across at the Beasts of Holm and talked about the Iolaire disaster.

  

The gun emplacements housed two 6 inch coast guns, had a watch tower and two search lights in smaller enclosures. How effective the guns would have been is questionable; when the Dutch Submarine Zeehond failed to respond to the challenges one of the guns was fired, it missed and the shell bounced over the water, embedding itself in the wall of Sandwickhill Cemetery. Much to the embarrassment of the Navy but to the huge amusement of the young people form Tong School when they heard the story.

Although the daylight at this time of year is short it does allow for some amazing skies which we took the chance to enjoy before boarding the bus to go to the museum for a visit.

Environmental Studies with Tong School

Tim was asked by Tong School to show them how they could use the moorland, a short walk from the school, to look at the fauna and flora they could find there.

The class wrote their own journey plan to get out to the moor and they organised the class to get there. When they arrived at the moor using the Outdoor Team’s environmental box they researched the plants and invertebrates they found documenting them with photographs and drawings.

Tong School Orienteering

At this time of year with the good weather is when the outdoor team are in demand. Tim was in Tong School to do the Bronze Youth Navigator Award.

The session started with some time in classroom (it can be done outside but needs good weather otherwise the paper disintegrates) the young people created an ‘island’ on the classroom floor using a rope as the shore and then populated it with buildings and features. They then drew their own map of the island. This give the opportunity to talk about scale, how to denote features with symbols and the importance of the key.

This lead to talking about how important it is to orientate the map and touching on North, South, East and West.

The class were then given a map of the school grounds where Tim had already set out twenty orienteering clippers. With a score card, a map and a quick refresher on orientating the map outside the class set off to navigate around the course around the school.

At the end of the session there was a recap of the essential point of orientating the map and the whole class had completed their Bronze award.

Young Navigator Award Scheme

The first term of 2018 has seen a few school groups braving the cold weather to get outside and complete their Young Navigator Bronze Awards. P5 & 6 at Tong Primary had some classes with their teacher Mrs Emmott, and then Andrew and Isi went in to finish up with an orienteering challenge around the school grounds. Whilst they were out and about, we asked them to point out where they were on the map, orientate it correctly to North, and show us the route they were planning to take. They also looked at symbols, scale and compasses. They are now well on their way to being able to navigate themselves around the great outdoors, so parents if you’re planning to take them out feel free to get them practicing!

Working with Tong School

Tong School in the summer term of 2017 did a whole school project on outdoor learning, the team supported elements of this.

Tim provided a twighlight session to explore ‘how do I begin to soften the walls of the classroom’ with the staff.

This session led to taking several classes look at the ecosystem of the beach a short walk from the school.

The young people discovered the diversity of the ecosystem using the new resource boxes.

Another class wanted to look at fire; the local fire office came into the school to talk about fire safety, the young people particularly enjoyed seeing how a fire extinguisher worked.

Tim then came in with the fire pan for two sessions; one to reinforce the fire safety lessons and try different ways of lighting a fire and the second to cook on an open fire. The fire pan was set up under a tarp in the school grounds and the young people cooked fruit and vegetable kebabs followed by bannocks which they mixed themselves. After the session the teacher reported several of the young people had gone home made bannocks and asked for peppers with their dinner.

The English and Gaelic nurseries had a session exploring the school grounds which have a lovely stand of trees using the environmental resources boxes, with the magnifying glasses and the sample jars creating a huge amount of interest.

Particularly the large slug they found.

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