Teaching Sequence

Activity 1: Places for play

This activity has many opportunities for extension. One extension to consider is to allowing students to play so you can observe and later discuss play behaviour in the school ground.

Outdoors:

Visit the main areas where the school’s younger students are expected to play.
Discuss and inform students about safety while playing.
Ask students to sort themselves into groups by standing beside their favourite playground equipment.
Find out what school ground games they like to play. Discuss the best or safest place to play their games.
If there are places students should not play games or there are other school rules about where students can go and what they can do explain the rules at the different locations.
Discuss how students can avoid accidents. What should students do if they should hurt themselves? What should students do if they feel scared?

Classroom:

Students can draw their favourite game they like to play in their school ground. Discuss the things they can draw in their picture. What can they draw to show they are playing safely? Example: playing chase on the grass.

Activity 2: Shapes

Outdoors:

Start by walking to an area with playground equipment.
Find different shapes in the playground equipment.
Ask students to make the shape with their fingers, arms, bodies or with another student.
Give the shapes a name or describe the shapes.
Look around for similar shapes.
Look at the shape of buildings and other structures in the school.
Find some leaves. Do they have the same shapes as represented by built strucrures? Do students have words to describe the shape of leaves? Can they make the shape of different leaves using their fingers? How do the shapes of leaves differ.

Classroom:

Examples of activities that can be done in the classroom:

Collect leaves and sort them into shapes.
Categorise shapes in the classroom.
Draw some of shapes seen in the school ground.

Activity 3: Colours

Preparation:

Make a list of things that students might see in the school ground.
Or make some flash cards with the colours students are able to distinguish.
Take a bag to collect leaves.
Or no preparation other than reviewing the colours students already know.

Outdoors:

Move to different areas in the school ground so that all the most contrasting places are covered
At each location:
- Ask students to find the colours of the most dominant structures, living things, objects etc.
- Ask students to look around their feet and observe the colour of the surface they are standing on.
- Look for different shade of the same colour.
- Look for dark or heavily shade places and very brightly light places.
Discuss colours such as gold and silver when you come across them.
The teacher collects a range of different leaves. If they are taken from live plants explain students should not remove leaves from plants, thus is a special case.

Classroom:

Students draw correct the thing they observed using the correct colours.
Sort the leaves into different colours and shades.

Activity 4: Listening

Options:

To get students to listen to the most sounds, ask them to be quite and point out what they can listen to. If you point out a sound by asking them a question such as “can you hear the dog?” they will answer and they can’t listen to the sounds.
You may prefer not to tell them what the sounds are and ask them questions so you will need to get them to be quite between questions.

Outdoors:

Take students to some different location such as places that are noisy and places that have less noise made by people and their machines.
Ask students to stand in a circle and to be quiet.
As different sounds are heard:
- You can point out the sound they should be listening to.
- If you ask questions then you will need to get students to be quite between questions.
Some prompts to help cover the sounds that students are likely to hear:
- Machines including cars, aircraft and maybe lawnmowers
- Birds
- Dogs
- People
- Wind
- Sirens or loud speakers
- Point out subtle difference eg children playing sounds, adult talking sounds etc.

Classroom:

Observe if the sounds are different when all the students are quite when they get back to the classroom.
Students can draw a picture of something they heard in the school ground and write down its name.

Activity 5: The sky, sun and wind

Preparation:

Review with students the reason why they should never look at the sun.

Outdoors:

Choose two areas to take students, one where there is maximum coverage of the sky e.g. in the middle of an oval and the second under a shady area. Co to the open location first.
At the open location these are some prompts that can assist you:
- Discuss what the sky is like today.
- Discuss how the sky changes.
- What do some of the changes mean?
- How does cloud affect the weather?
- How do students know it is raining? (The question is for those teachers who like to joke with students)
- Is their wind, a breeze or is the air still?
- What is wind?
- Point out when birds or aircraft cross the sky.
- Where is the sun?
- If the moon is out (it will not be obvious) point it out to students who are likely to be surprised.
- How hot is the sun today?
- Are there a lot of dark shadows?
You may like to get the students to pretend they are leaves being blown around by the wind for 30 seconds. They can start being blown around when you say wind and must stop and return when you yell out the wind has died.
Go to shady location:
- How much sun is there in the shady location?
- Is the shady area cooler?
- Is the wind as strong?

Classroom:

Students can draw a picture of the sky with the sun and clouds. They may wish to have birds or aircraft or the moon if they observed them. The class could be divided into three one group drawing a sunny day, the second ground a windy and cloudy day and the third group a rainy day.
There is a joke about a weather stone. The class could make a weather stone and hang it outside the classroom where they can observe it inside. A weather stone made from a large smooth people and tied to rope so it can be suspended. The weather stone indicates the weather:
- If it is bright, the day is sunny
- If the stone is moving it is windy
- If the stone is wet it has been raining etc.

Activity 6: Trees

Set this challenge to prepare students. When students go outside can they agree on:

Which tree is the tallest in the school ground?
Which tree has the thickest tree trunk?
Which tree is the best home for birds?

Other preparation:

Gather some leaves that can be photocopied for an art activity. Place the leaves on the photocopier so it will be easy for student to cut out the leaves. Test one page. If it is dark and student can’t colour the leaves, make the copy a lot lighter.
If the class has access to a tablet install a measuring app that can be used to measure the height of things (these apps in my experience can only approximate).

Outdoors:

Take students around in a circuit covering the areas of the school ground with trees.
Attempt to compare the heights of trees. Ask students for their suggestions on how height can be compared. Put two students back to back to compare heights. Jokingly ask why we can’t do that with trees (but expect some good answers)?
Students can measure the width of trunks by doing tree hugs. Get students work out a way of comparing the width of trunks.
Ask students where the leaves on trees grow? Then refine this concept by asking them to observe and explain where leaves do not grow.
While going around the school find if there are one or more trees with a lot of birds. To identify if birds are in trees use both sight and hearing.

Classroom:

Use the photocopy of the leaves.
Make a trunk and some branches on a board in the classroom.
Students can cut out, colour and paste the leaves in the correct location.
They can also draw, cut out and add some birds.

Activity 7: Up close

Set this challenge to prepare students.

How small is the smallest stone?
How small is the smallest plant?
How small is the smallest leaf?
How small is the smallest creature?
What else is small in the school ground?

Discourage students from:

Touching or catching living creatures.
Damaging plants.

A ruler is a good tool for students to scratch around and using as a probe. The teacher might have a plastic bag (clear freezer bag) for collecting small items. Also any students wearing classes, it is helpful if their classes are clean.

Outdoors:

Take students to areas where they can scratch around looking for things and where there are shrubs they won’t damage.
Ask them to search for one item at a time. Collect some of the small items they find. (can be hard to retrieve from the bottom of the bag).
Get them to share their discoveries with other students.

Classroom:

Make a class display of small objects by using clear sticky tape to tape the tiny objects onto one or more pages.
Find out what the smallest objects in the classroom are.

Activity 8: Touch

These activities is best started in the classroom and then go outside.

Classroom:

Ask students to touch various objects and describe how they feel. Include smooth and rough as well as clothing, rubber etc.

How do different surfaces feel?
Do any surfaces feel colder than others?
Can students guess looking at objects if they are smooth?
Make a couple of objects wet. How does making something wet make it feel different?

Outdoors:

The class can make their way around the school touching items that feel different. In theory there shouldn’t be any materials in the school that can hurt students, however you should have a good look around before the activity.
Discuss how things feel when touched as the class works it way around the school. Emphasize the word and praise students when they introduce new words to describe touch.

Classroom:

Compare and contrast how the surfaces of things they touched in the classroom compared with outdoors.

Activity 9: Does it belong?

This activity has an emphasis on litter.

Explain to students that the class is going to do a treasure hunt and pick up the first 20 different things they find in the school ground that can be picked up. Students are not to touch or pick these things up – the teacher will.

The teacher will need a large bag and a pair of tongs for picking things up off the ground.

Outdoors:

Explain to students they are not to go more than 10 steps from the teacher.
Start the activity in a location where there is a high chance of finding litter.
Students point out items on the ground that can be picked up.
As each item goes into the bag, announce the number and what is going into the bag.
Reject any item that is similar eg a brown leaf is different to a green leaf but don’t have a lot of green leaves. Be less discriminating with litter as it would be good in this activity to have at least half.

Classroom:

Go through each item that was collected in the school ground and sort into tow categories:
- Things that belong: Natural items such as sticks and leaves
- Things that don’t belong: Litter
Discuss why there is litter
Discuss how to prevent litter
Each student can draw a picture of a rubbish bin with a picture of a student placing rubbish in the bin.

Activity 10: Dead or alive?

Dead or alive is an interesting concept for this age. When asked if a manufactured item or structure is dead, reply as it was never alive it can’t be dead. Interestingly when this age is presented with a stuffed animal their question will be “is it real?”

Outdoors:

The focus will be on plants as the class goes around the school.
Find some things that have obviously died or fallen leaves and twigs and compare them with the living plant.
How do plants change when they die?
How do you know when a plant is dead?
How might you tell if an animal is dead?

Classroom:

On a page, students draw a live tree next to a dead tree.

Final activity

With the class, review the school rules and codes of conduct for when students are in the school ground.

School ground explorer

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