Case Study: Outdoor Learning Trails – Learning Outside the Classroom
With more and more schools looking for meaningful ways of using their outdoor areas as learning areas, our range of tailor-made Outdoor Learning Trails is proving ever-more popular.
Providing engaging and multi-sensory approaches in Maths, Literacy and Science, they have been designed to meet all budgets and are developed to support your particular needs and make best use of your external spaces. Coming complete with a training package for staff (together with a Handbook), they are specially designed to allow you to adapt and add to them.
Here are some examples of recent trails we have developed in partnership with schools…
Working with Sudley Junior School in Liverpool, we provided age-differentiated outdoor sessions with all pupils, encouraging them to look for some of the examples of Maths that are all around us, be inspired by the natural world in creating collaborative poems and identify relationships between their Science topics and the outdoor spaces. Working with a finite set of resources provided by the school, we then designed a Maths Trail for the new Outdoor Learning Zone, training staff in its implementation through a half-day INSET. The Trail has proved so popular and successful that we’ve now been asked to design a Science Trail for the school and we’ll introduce it later this month!
Our partnership with Pendle Vale College in Lancashire, took a different approach to creating a Maths Trail seeing children taking a leading role in the design process. Working with seventy Year 8 students and their Maths teachers over a number of half-day sessions, we developed a Trail consisting of sixteen stations, each exploring a different aspect of shape. The students launched the activities they had designed at an Open Evening and, whilst many had previously struggled to engage with the subject, all were able to confidently present the fruits of their labours and talk in fluent Maths!
Supporting SEBD Key Stage 2 pupils, the Primary Education Centre in Liverpool had different needs again and asked us to design a Maths Trail that would both place a high priority on their children’s particular needs and provide a full range of differentiated activities. The Trail was implemented after a half-day INSET and teachers have really enjoyed coming up with additional ways of using the resource and sharing these with others.
Having thoroughly enjoyed our Magic of Maths programmes, St Margaret Mary’s Infants School in Liverpool commissioned us to design a Maths Trail for Years 1 and 2. We’ve thoroughly enjoyed exploring their external spaces and, following meetings with the school’s Numeracy Co-ordinator, are having a great time putting the Trail together.
“Staff thoroughly enjoyed the as creatives Math’s Trail INSET; useful, relevant and thoroughly enjoyable.” Headteacher, Primary Education Centre Liverpool
Related Workshops
Outdoor Maths
Outdoor spaces provide wonderful opportunities to explore how numbers and shapes create both the built and natural worlds.
