Outdoor Learning Club

Year 2 Outdoor Learning Club Blog

We’ve had such a fun time at Outdoor Learning this term.
With such fantastic weather, we’ve had the chance to do lots of different activities involving hunting for things in nature. We went on a Nature Hunt around the school grounds. We used our senses of feeling, smelling, sight and listening to discover the awe and wonder of nature around us. The children each had a Nature Hunt list to complete. We even found a slow worm!

‘My favourite thing on the Nature Hunt was feeling the softness of the Lamb’s Ears flowers in the outdoor garden.’
 ‘I liked sitting in the quiet area listening to the birds.’
‘I liked finding out about some of the different flowers.’
‘I liked going onto the field to look for different bugs.’
 
One week we went outside on a scavenger hunt to find inspiration for paintings. We then used these back in the classroom to help us create our own paintings of nature.

 ‘My favourite week was when we did the painting because I love painting.’

Another time, we used the idea of using art with nature to recreate our own 3D nature artwork on the playground.
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‘I really enjoyed collecting leaves, twigs, stones, flowers and feathers to create my own pictures.’
 
Being able to use our school’s new mud kitchen (where some of us pretended to be archologists digging up ancient stones and treasures) was such fun. We’ve also used the sandpit to pretend we were at the beach. We worked as a team to make the sand wet enough so we could build a sandcastle using different objects. Our fortress looked amazing!

‘My favourite part of outdoor learning club was mixing the water with the sand to make wet sand. I really liked filling up the buckets with the sand and putting it with my friend’s castles to make one big sandcastle.’

Finally, we’ve been doing some weeding, digging over and planting in one of the outdoor gardens. More teamwork was needed to complete this job, which we did brilliantly. We’ve planted some Sweet William seeds, which we are hoping will have grown by the time we return to school in September.

It’s been a fantastic year 2 club summed up perfectly by E who said, ‘I would like to do this club again because I had so much fun. I like looking and learning about nature. I also like creating my own art without having to do colouring.’