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?

What else do we do outdoors?

Not much maths outside lately, due to poor weather.  So I thought I'd blog about other things we get up to outdoors.  Recently we investigated magnets and on day one we stayed indoors and I let the children try out everything in the magnet box for a bit of self discovery.  The next day though we were focusing on what materials magnets are attracted to, so I gave every pupil a horseshoe magnet and sent them onto the playground.  Before they went out they told me what things they predicted would be magnetic.  It was great, they ran about testing everything!  After they came in and wrote down what they had found out.  One child even said maybe there are some metals that are not magnetic.  So a great child led investigation, where I supplied no answers, just the opportunities and much more fun than staying indoors!