Saturday 29 September 2012

Numicon and the outdoors

My school has purchased Numicon for all of our classes recently, lucky us!  We are all trying it out.  But what does this have to do with outdoors, you may ask? Well I found two links on the Numicon site I thought I would share with you.http://www.numicon.com/free_resources/teaching_support_resources.aspx

I had some other ideas like hiding number bonds around in little bags and the children have to check the bag to see what they have and put in the correct place.

How have you taken numicon outside?  Let me know.

Sunday 23 September 2012

No maths outdoors this week!

I'm sorry to say that we did not go out for maths this week.  We had a display change to get ready for and this took up some time.  Towards the end of the week we were looking at 1 more and 1 less and I just couldn't think of an outdoor lesson.  Have you got any ideas?  I will say we were outside for literacy finding wooden rhyming pictures I had hidden in the sand.

Friday 14 September 2012

Outdoor learning

The weather has been great this week!  Lucky us.  At the moment we are working on basic number skills. One of my groups went outside in maths to find hidden number cards and then had to make human number lines.  Another found hidden compare bears and had to count how many they found.  We then take photos as evidence of their work.
But of course maths isn't the only thing we do outside.  We are learning about the senses and poetry.  So this week we have gone outside to find signs of Autumn and collected them in and displayed our finds on trays.  We made smell pots, which involves finding things that smell and picking them from around the school grounds.  We are lucky at my school as we have a sensory garden, veggie patch and fruit trees.  We also did a listening walk for sense of hearing in the outdoor meadow.  The children even heard some insects.  To explore the sense of touch we used this hand template (you can find it on my pinterest board)  and found the textures outdoors.  What have you been doing outside this week?

Sunday 9 September 2012

Week 1 -Done!

Okay so it was only a 3 day week with the children (5 for me) but it still felt like more!  I have a small class this year which is nice, I keep counting them because I think children are missing.  We didn't go outdoors for maths but we went outside during choosing time.  The children had a chance to explore their new outside area, we've also managed to snag some wooden blocks and a water table!

Saturday 1 September 2012

Good Bye Summer Holidays!

Back to school on Monday!  Of course I have been in over the holidays putting my classroom back together after getting new double glazed windows.  But Monday and Tuesday are staff days and the children return on Wednesday.  In addition to the new windows I've also got new sliding doors that lead onto my outdoor space.  So I'm looking forward to having a bit more free flow into this area.