hello all, what a great day in the woods! We were joined by Coryla Jones, an NQT teacher from St Sylvester’s PS for the morning as she was interested on what goes on. Great to have her on board and really lucky she came along as the adult ratio was low that day and we needed all the adult support.
the day was devoted to maths and there was 4 main maths activities.
1. Sitting round the fire we consolidated on all the mental maths that we have been doing i.e. addition, subtraction, fractions and I digit/ 2 digit multiplication. Each pupils was given a stick and they had to write a mental problem on the stick and work out the answer and put it on the other end of the lollipop stick,. They then stuck it in the ground ,they then stood up and moved 4 round to a new position, in front of someone else’s stick. they then, in turns, read out the problem to a chosen person round the fire. A good mental warm up.
The next three activities were in rotation as the class was split into 3 groups.
2. How many prickles have holly leaves. An activity of collecting data i.e. holly leaves , and counting how many prickles an individual leaf has. ( this varies from 8 to 22!) The leaves were then displayed on a bar chart on the ground and pupils could interpret their findings . This was that the average amount of prickles is 15 – 17 prickles, but varies considerably!
3. Crate . 3 – D shapes using twigs , sticks and masking tape. The pupils had to construct a cuboid and Pyramid. We learned a lot from this activity i.e. use thin sticks , not branches! Think thin and small. The masking tape would not stick on large wet sticks.
4. Ms Jones delivered a great activity in which she got the pupils to think about non standard measuring lengths to be found in the forest ( e.g. , logs, sticks), compared with Standard units ( Metre, cm). A very good activity getting the pupils to think about their surroundings and the evolution of standard measuring units..
Personal Evaluation and reflection. A full on morning of much maths in the forest! Maybe it was too ambitious and there was a lot put in. maybe in future the 3 d activity would be better organised and may have cut the rotation down to even two activities. great to share ideas with Ms Jones and bounce around a few ideas. the bar chart worked very well and could have been developed further.