Outdoor Learning
Intent:
At Red Oak Primary School, we believe that all children should have a strong understanding of the world around them. We are very fortunate to be surrounded by beautiful natural areas, both on our school’s grounds and within the local area. Children spend up to 7 hours of the day within school, which is the majority of the waking day for our children. We want our children to not only use the outdoor areas as a resource to boost our already creative curriculum, but to also learn about the outside world. How to care for it, why it is important to look after it and how we can encourage life to thrive in our outdoor areas.
Outdoor Learning is a broad term that includes: outdoor play, school grounds projects, environmental education, recreational and adventure activities, and personal and social development. Outdoor learning can provide a dramatic contrast to the indoor classroom. There is strong evidence that good quality learning outside the classroom adds much value to classroom learning. The outdoors can be used as a resource to deepen our understanding and boost our already amazing curriculum.
Direct experience outdoors is powerful, motivating and has impact and credibility. The results from outdoor learning can be immediate as well as active. Through skilled teaching, outdoor experiences readily become a stimulating source of fascination, personal growth and can lead to breakthroughs in learning. Active learning readily develops the learning skills of enquiry, experiment, feedback, reflection, review, communication, problem solving, an enterprising attitude and co-operative learning. Outdoor Learning can help to bring learning alive. Outdoor learning also provides experiential opportunities allowing pupils to respond positively to opportunities, challenges and responsibilities, to manage risk and to cope with change.
Implementation:
Outdoor learning will be embedded across the school, with all classes making use of our outdoor spaces and the surrounding environment to enhance their lessons. Each class will also take part in a dedicated term of planned outdoor learning within our forest area, providing opportunities to explore, connect with nature, and apply learning in real-world, practical contexts. Additionally, our outdoor spaces will become a hub for lessons focused on caring for and sustaining the environment. Children will gain hands-on experience in activities such as planting, maintaining green spaces, and creating habitats like bug hotels and bird boxes to encourage wildlife into our school grounds.
Impact:
Benefits of Outdoor Learning:
• Outdoor learning helps to ensure that children are successful learners enabling children to
develop knowledge and skills in ways that add value to their everyday learning experiences.
• Outdoor learning enables children to be confident individuals and impacts positively upon
young children’s attitudes beliefs and self-perceptions.
• Outdoor learning contributes towards creating independent learners with high self-esteem and self-sufficiency.
• Outdoor learning can have a positive impact upon children’s behaviour.
• Outdoor learning contributes towards the promotion and children’s understanding of the
importance of developing a Healthy lifestyle.
• Outdoor learning has a positive impact upon children’s personal and social development. It
can also bring about community cohesion and allow children to develop as responsible
citizens who make a positive contribution to their wider community. It can create pride in
the school and wider community and promote community involvement, renewing children’s
pride and creating a sense of belonging and responsibility.
• It raises learners’ attainment, promotes and strengthens communication skills, team work
and sense of cohesion.
• There is clear evidence that boys in particular are more active in their learning in an outdoor
environment.
Please double click to open the Outdoor Learning Calendar PDF which has clickable months that will take you to activities for each month: