Today we explored the benefits of how we can use the outdoors in order to explore our environment and how we can plan other lessons relating to the surroundings that we have. According to curriculum for excellence “all children and young people are participating in a range of progressive and creative outdoor learning experiences which are clearly part of the curriculum”. It also states that working outside can allow children to transfer skills that they have already acquired in the classroom, in different contexts that they are not used to. It can also help with class topic lessons such as science, as they could explore their local environments and write down what they find, and as a smaller group, present what you find with others and compare your results. It also encourages more practical lessons as according to a parent council member “They understand what they’re doing a lot more – it’s all very well looking at books and speaking about things but if they’re outside doing it”. It also allows you to explore the environment and use objects such as leaves to reinforce basic counting, for example: counting the number of petals on a flower, the number of trees on a river bank. We used apps such as photo booth and pic collage in order to take photos of what our surroundings were and effects such as mirror, in order to show symmetry. Also, pic collage allowed us to create a mini group of pictures and allowed for us to explain what it was that we had seen and taken photos of. These apps can be used effectively in lessons as you can get the children to take photos and then get them to label the different objects and animals that the discover, or even use it in maths by getting them to write how many of a type of animal or object they encountered.
