Outdoor Learning May 2025

This week is an outdoor learning where each class has one day when they try to spend as much time as possible outside. The Biggies, minus the primary sevens, had a day on Tuesday this week.

Pendulum Art

We startedthe day with some pendulum art.

In the morning we did some pendulum art, we did pendulum art by attaching a cup with a hole at the bottom onto a piece of string them we put paint in it and then we swung the pendulum over paper to make some art. We did it outside because we didn’t do it inside because the floor would get too dirty. We attached the cup by having a bit of string hanging A bit of string from a stick suspended between 2 chairs, we put some weights and a carabiner and we put a wire to hold the cup onto the carabiner.

Robert

I got back just after playtime when my class was doing a huge piece of artwork. There was a huge giant piece of black paper and there also was a long thin thread over the basket ball hoop. At the end of the thread there was knot tied to a karabiner holding twisted wire holding a cup with a hole and paint in it. Robert my best friend was holding the thread keeping everything up. I was amazed.

This is pendulum art. How it works is if you push the cup or let go of the cup from not where the cup gravitates to the cup will swing in cool patterns letting paint out to mark those patterns. We did three different colours and it looked amazing in the end. It was nearly lunch time so we had to bring the gigantic art piece in when the rain decided to come.

Gene

Yesterday was outdoor learning day. In the morning we started by making some pendulum art we needed to have a cup, two chairs, string, metal wire, some paint, rocks, paper, sticks and a pencil. We made a pendulum by placing the chairs opposite each other then placing the stick on top. We used the pencil to pierce the bottom and the sides of the cup for the paint to leak through. We used metal wire as a hook to put in the 2 holes on the sides to hold the cup up then we connected the metal wire to the string with a carabiner. We added some washers for some weight we then rotated the string on the stick till it was about 5-10cm off the ground then we got some paper and placed it down after we placed the paper down we then got some rocks to weigh the paper down. Then we put the paint in the cup and started to swing it, it made some cool art so we tried it on a bigger paper with more colours too.

Jason

Firepit

How we did this is we used a sharp knife to chop the wood. First the person with the knife will put their hand on the wood chunk about 3/4 down. Second they will carefully grab the knife and put it about in the middle of the wood chunk and remove their hand. Third they would say tap and another person with a large and thick wood stick would hammer the knife into the wood and repeat this until the top of the knife was in. Lastly the wood hammer the edge of the knife until the wood chunk was split in two.

Gene

Around the Fire


We didn’t get any photos around the fire. This does keep happening. The pupils all know the rules and are very respectful fo fire.

We did a fire in the fire pit we did some fruit over the fire pit and marshmallows, the fruit tasted really nice so did the marshmallow but i burned it a bit but the bananas tasted nice.it was really fun

Billie

Then we got the fire pit roaring. We told some spooky stories 👻 and then we had some marshmallows on sticks (I accidentally burnt mine 🙁). Later on, we had our fruit skewers.

Xander

After lunch we made a fire, we tried using our flint and steels but we couldn’t get them to work so we just used a lighter, we light a cotton pad and put it to the wood. When the fire was good enough we started cooking our marshmallows, mine kind of went black but it tasted amazing! When the fire went down a bit we put on our fruit kebabs that we prepared earlier. They where quite good.

Robert

A wee while later, we had a fire pit, we had fruit skewers and toasted marshmallows. I didn’t have any because I don’t like it, I would rather have something different that I like. We also shared some stories and also made some up with a sentence each, Mr. Johnston also came out with a talking stick and asks us loads of questions about ourselves, shortly after it was home time.

Chloe

We also made some fruit skewers to grill we were also toasting marshmallows. Most people burnt/dropped they’re marshmallow but I didn’t I burnt mine but I didn’t drop it in took the crust off and ate it and repeated that till i finished my marshmallow. We played a game about creating a story everyone got to say one sentence to create the story. Then we gone inside to get our fruit skewers then we put them on the grill for about 5 minutes. The apple didn’t taste the best the banana taste quite good and the strawberry was very sour. After everyone finished they’re skewers we told some stories until 2:50PM then we went inside and started cleaning up then it became 2:55PM and the first bell rang. We put on our jackets and bags and then we went home.

Jason
Pendlum Art Work

Outdoor Learning Day – Circles in the Rain

We had outdoor learning day today. We had to change our plans a little because of the weather, or maths went turned from a shape photograph safari to working with chalk & circles. It was too wet for iPads outdoors.

It was not too wet for the Biggies, we all had lots of waterproofs on.

The first thing we did was to gather some nice straightish willow branches for cooking later in the day.

Next Maths, we worked on by drawing circles on the playground using 2 different methods. This helped us think about the properties of circles, and the shape they make when they cross each other. Some folk just had fun with spirals too.

Although some of the Biggies were a bit dismayed at the weather, they all got really involved in making circles and were surprised when it was time for playtime.

After playtime we went back out for some P.E. The rain had really started to pour, this made the wet ground extra slippy and there were some exciting bumps and skids. After about half an hour of this we went back inside got our clothes sorted out and made some bread dough in the hope it would dry up in the afternoon.

Fire pit

In the afternoon the weather brightened and we went out to ‘bake’ our bread on the fire.

Pupils cooking 'damper' around a fire pit.

When working around a fire we need to follow quite a lot of rules to help us stay safe. One pupil acts as the Fire Chief, and controls all the movement around the fire. When approaching the fire to light it or add wood pupils need to adopt the respect position. The Biggies are really good at this and manage to both stay safe & have fun.

We cooked some ‘damper’ this is bread dough wrapped around a stick. It doent always cook evenly, but almost everyone manage to make something they enjoyed, right of the fire without jam or anything. It takes quite like wookd cooked pizza crust.

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