We love teaching and making resources to promote enjoyment, motivation, and understanding for children and teachers with a particular passion for learning outside the classroom.
We love teaching and making resources to promote enjoyment, motivation, and understanding for children and teachers with a particular passion for learning outside the classroom.
Bring the outdoors to Advent with this fun outdoor activity Advent calendar. Each day of Advent has a fun and easy outdoor activity to complete. This calendar can be used in class, at home, or as part of a club or group. It’s great fun and your children are sure to love exploring the outdoors each day.
There are flaps included with this resource for you to stick over each activity. If you are not using the flaps, encourage your students not to peek at the other days!
Merry Christmas!
Please don’t forget to rate this resource to let us know what you think.
Also be sure to visit my store Saving The Teachers and FOLLOW ME to see my new products and hear about upcoming sales!
The sound map is a great way to get students listening to the sounds around them as they investigate this fascinating topic with good links to measuring, compass work and estimation.
They will choose a spot in your outdoor area to sit then mark on the sounds they can hear in relation to them (with them being in the middle of the sheet) by drawing or writing on the activity sheet.
Encourage students to think carefully about how far away they think the sounds are and mark them on the sheet accordingly. You can also look at bearings by getting students to mark on the estimated distances on their map. You can even give each child a compass so they can also mark on the bearings of each sound.
Please don’t forget to rate this resource to let us know what you think.
Also be sure to visit my store Saving The Teachers and FOLLOW ME to see my new products and hear about upcoming sales!
16 visual ecosystem vocabulary cards that are perfect for your topic word wall complete with a title. They are a great way to help your children learn the key terms needed for this exciting topic. We have found them especially helpful for children with English as an additional language. Each card contains the key word, definition, and visual aid.
Contents
17 X Key Vocabulary Cards
Display Title
2 Blank Cards
Vocabulary Included
Ecosystem
Adaptation
Biodegrade
Canopy
Carnivore
Community
Coniferous
Consumers
Deciduous
Dormant
Food chain
Food web
Habitat
Herbivore
Nutrients
Omnivore
Predator
Prey
Territory
Please don’t forget to rate this resource to let us know what you think.
Also be sure to visit my store Saving The Teachers and FOLLOW ME to see my new products and hear about upcoming sales!
This resource contains two differentiated cut and stick sheets to teach day and night comparisons as part of your science topic. Students will cut out the pictures and stick them into the correct category.
** Activity Sheet 1**: Students will sort the pictures into ‘day’ and night’ and stick them in the table.
Activity Sheet 2: Students will sort the pictures into ‘day’, ‘night’, and ‘both’ in the Venn Diagram.
Please don’t forget to rate this resource to let us know what you think.
Also be sure to visit my store and FOLLOW ME to see my new products and hear about upcoming sales!
The smell hunt is a great activity to get students exploring the wonderful smells nature has to offer. It’s perfect if you’re looking at our senses as part of the human body topic or descriptive writing and adjectives.
Students will find and crush the leaves of plants or trees before letting their partner smell the leaves without letting them see them. Their partner must then see if they can find the same leaves based on what they smelt.
For higher grade levels you can use small pots for them to collect and store the leaves in as well as completing the record sheet before swapping sheets with their partner.
This resource contains optional differentiated activities sheets that can be used to support this activity and provide good curricular links.
**Record sheet: **These sheets can be used for students to record the leaves they’ve collected and think of some adjectives to describe the different smells.
Evaluation: These sheets get students to think of the science behind smells, diving deeper into how we smell the crushed leaves and why things have particular smells.
The smell hunt is a great starter for our potion making resource.
Please don’t forget to rate this resource to let us know what you think.
Also be sure to visit my store and FOLLOW ME to see my new products and hear about upcoming sales!
This biomes visual word search is a great way to reinforce or introduce your ecosystems topic key vocabulary. It’s great for morning work, filling activities, or just as some fun! Your class will learn the key terms in no time with the help of our fun visuals and word search.
Key Vocabulary:
Biome
Climate
Deciduous
Desert
Mediterranean
Montane
Polardesert
Savanna
Steppe
Taiga
Tropical
Tundra
Please don’t forget to rate this resource to let us know what you think.
Also, be sure to visit my store and FOLLOW ME to see my new products and hear about upcoming sales!
This HUGE bundle is packed full of outdoor science goodies from fun investigations to practical activities. It covers a huge range of topics for years 1 - 3.
Topics covered:
Animal Adaptations
Animal Classification
Earth & Moon
Electricity
Floating and Sinking
Habitats
Magnetism
Materials and their Properties
Mini-Beasts
Plants
Skeletons
Sound
STEM Investigations
We hope you find this pack useful and enjoy working outside with your class!
Please don’t forget to rate this bundle to let us know what you think.
Also, be sure to visit my store and FOLLOW ME to see my new products and hear about upcoming sales!
This activity looks at the decomposition rate of both natural and man made objects. Students will give their predictions before placing the objects onto a large outdoor timeline.
Teaching Structure:
Draw a 0 - 1000 year timeline on the playground using chalk. Check students understand what decomposition is.
Get students to collect a variety of natural and man made items from your outdoor space (this is also a great way to give your outdoor space a little tidy!). If there is not much rubbish, it’s useful to add the items from the list.
Get students to share what they’ve collected and predict how long it will take each item to decompose. If wanted, they can complete their tables while doing this. Once they’ve made their predictions share the correct decomposition rates, get them to complete their table and place their objects in the correct place on the timeline.
If you’d rather, you can use our item cards instead of the students collecting their own items.
Please don’t forget to rate this resource to let us know what you think.
Also, be sure to visit my store and FOLLOW ME to see my new products and hear about upcoming sales!
This activity is all about students exploring the properties of different materials in the outdoors. This lesson can be done anywhere, from the beach to your garden.
If access to the outdoors is limited you can easily adapt it to be done inside. For this activity students will find items matching the properties on the sheet and record what they’ve found by either writing or drawing.
Encourage students to think carefully about their decisions. What makes something heavy? Would that be heavy for a giant?
Please don’t forget to rate this resource to let us know what you think.
Also be sure to visit my store and FOLLOW ME to see my new products and hear about upcoming sales!
This outdoor STEM challenge gets students working as a team as they explore your forces and motion topic, with a focus on gravity. They will be set the challenge to transport water from a bucket at the top of a hill / set of stairs to the buckets at bottom using only a bucket and length of hose.
Once they’ve completed the activity they can fill in the evaluation sheet which gets them to think about the effectiveness of their method as well as how they worked together as a team.
Set Up:
This activity works best in teams of 3 or 4. For each team you need 3 buckets and a length of clean hose. Find a hill (or set of stairs (however space can be an issue here) and place one bucket full of water at the top and another at the bottom for each team.
The students can not touch either of these buckets.
Their challenge is to transport the water from the bucket at the top to the bucket at the bottom without touching either of the buckets. They must only use the third bucket and the hose to transport the water. You will see lots of weird and wonderful ways that the students come up with to do this.
The idea is for the students to develop a siphon by placing one end of the hose in the water and the other in the empty bucket, sucking until the water reaches the high point in the hose, and then letting gravity do the rest. If by the end of the activity the students have not used this method to transport the water, show it to them and encourage a discussion as to why it works.
Resources Needed Per Team:
3 buckets of the same size
Hose (1 - 2 meters long)
To make things more interesting you could also add more objects they can use that won’t be as effective, such as a sponge.
Please don’t forget to rate this resource to let us know what you think.
Also be sure to visit my store and FOLLOW ME to see my new products and hear about upcoming sales!
This is a great outdoor activity as part of your living things topic, senses, outdoor art, or just as a fun outdoor activity. It’s a great way to get students exploring your outdoor space and appreciating the nature around them.
For this activity students will go on a walk around your outdoor space, recording what they spot along the way using pictures and simple words or sentences. This activity is a great way to get students looking closely at the nature around them, making observations, and recording what they see.
If pack contains different observation sheets to suite different needs and focuses. When on the walk you can either let the students choose when they want to draw or get everybody to stop at certain points to fill in their observations.
It works really well if you can do two nature walks in contrasting areas so that students can compare their observations and discuss why they see different things in the contrasting environments.
Please don’t forget to rate this resource to let us know what you think.
Also be sure to visit my store and FOLLOW ME to see my new products and hear about upcoming sales!
This is a fun cut and stick / outdoor ordering activity for food chains as part of your living things topic.
For this activity students will use chalk or our provided cards to complete the food chains. It’s a great way to introduce food chains while letting student get out of their seats taking part in the practical activity.
Before the students compete this activity they’ll need an input as to what food chains are and how they work.
Using Chalk: This method is our preferred way to do this activity. Put the students into pairs and give each pair the muddled food chain sheet. They must use the animals on the sheet to create their food chains by drawing pictures and arrows using chalk. This pack contains differentiated food chain sheets where the chains get more complex each time.
Picture Cards: This pack also contains sets of picture and arrow cards to make up the food chains. Each set is color coded. Put the students into pairs and give each group a set of picture and arrow cards for them to use to complete the food chain.
Please don’t forget to rate this resource to let us know what you think.
Also be sure to visit my store and FOLLOW ME to see my new products and hear about upcoming sales!
Imagine if insects had a social media platform… well now they do! Your class will think like an insect and create a ‘bugbook’ page for their chosen insect. This is a great cross-curricular activity that will firstly get students looking at the features, habitats, and characteristics of insects in their outdoor space as well as practicing their non-fiction writing and research skills.
It’s great when looking at description writing and non-fiction texts. You can also use this as a base to talk about internet safety using the question prompts provided. PSHE, science, and literacy all in one!
Teaching Structure:
Explain to your students that insects are getting social and love the new bugbook social media site. It’s their job to observe and research a chosen insect and make a bugbook profile for it. Share the example with them as a starting point to showcase the kind of things they may include. Get students to head outside, choose an insect they’d like to create a profile for and spend some time observing it, filling in as much of the research sheet as possible.
They can then compete the sheet using the internet to research. Once the research sheet is complete they can create the insect’s profile using the templates provided.
**Internet Safety: **Once they’ve completed their profiles, you can use the 10 internet safety question prompts to have a discussion with your class about the importance of being safe online. This could be done in small groups where each station is a different point outdoors.
Please don’t forget to rate this resource to let us know what you think.
Also, be sure to visit my store and FOLLOW ME to see my new products and hear about upcoming sales!
Get your class engaged with your forces and motion topic from the very start with this exciting outdoor science scavenger hunt activity. It’s also a fantastic way to assess what your class already know or have learnt during the forces and motion topic.
It’s a hassle free resource with minimum prep, designed to engage students with a wide range of learning styles.
This pack contains 10 challenge task cards that cover the following areas:
Air resistance
Gravity
Floating and sinking
Friction
Magnetism
My class had great fun in the outdoors while learning and recapping their skills. A fantastic lesson when the sun in shining!
Contents
Teacher’s Guide
8 x Differentiated Answer Sheets For The Children To Complete
10 x Challenge Task Cards
Top Tip: Laminate your cards so they can be used time and time again!
Resources needed for cards:
1 - Leaves
2 - A4 and A3 paper
3 - Sticks
4 - Magnets
5 - Toy car
6 - Bucket of water
7 - Tennis ball & similar sized plastic ball
8 - Football / basketball
9 - Bin bag / similar
10 - Tennis ball & similar sized plastic ball
Please don’t forget to rate this resource to let us know what you think.
Also, be sure to visit my store and FOLLOW ME to see my new products and hear about upcoming sales!
These 10 outdoor STEM activities are perfect as a stand-alone outdoor team building activity or as a team builder at the start or end of year.
This pack contains 10 challenge cards that you can laminate and use time and time again. Each resource is easy to facilitate, with most challenges only needing a selection of natural resources. We recommend you allow at least 20 minutes for each challenge card, however depending on how you want to use them, students could spend hours on just on one challenge.
We’ve seen them used really well when each team does 1 card per week, spending around 1 hour on each challenge.
**
Recommended resources in your outdoor space:**
A variety of different sized sticks
Plants with a variety of different sized leaves (ferns etc.).
A variety of different sized stones / bricks.
Wooden benches / chairs etc.
Logs
A variety of thin / thick rope and string.
Please don’t forget to rate this resource to let us know what you think.
Also, be sure to visit my store and FOLLOW ME to see my new products and hear about upcoming sales!
Energy is all around us, inside and out, as your class will find out with this fun and practical lesson. This activity is a great introduction or recap for your ‘forms of energy’ topic as students will go on a hunt to see how many different forms of energy they can spot.
Teaching Structure:
Get your students to run on the spot, do star jumps, push ups etc. (tire them out!). Explain that in order to do this they need energy, however energy can come in lots of different forms. There are lots of good videos on youtube that you can watch to help introduce this topic.
Definitions sheet: Get the students to complete the definitions sheet (or use the pre-populated one) so they have a good understanding as to what the different forms of energy are. They can take this with them to help with the main activity.
Record Sheet (differentiated): In pairs, get students to walk around (inside and out) for 15 – 20 minutes recording down the different forms of energy they can spot.
Class discussion: Once the students have seen which kinds of energy they could spot, discuss their findings as a class or in small groups. This activity can be great in all sorts of weather! Don’t be afraid for them to waterproof up and head outside!
Please don’t forget to rate this resource to let us know what you think.
Also be sure to visit my store and FOLLOW ME to see my new products and hear about upcoming sales!
This activity is all about students exploring different textures in the world around them. Don’t be afraid for students to get muddy for this activity! Explain to your class what the word ‘texture’ means and that they will be exploring all sorts of different textures in your outdoor space.
Give them the table and go through each texture, giving them a chance to check they know the meaning of each one. Once they are ready, wearing clothes that can get a bit wet and muddy, get them to go outside and try to find each of the textures in the table, drawing or writing down their findings.
Diff. 1 – Textures are already filled in on the table.
Diff. 2 – To give students more of a challenge, they can fill in different textures they can think of before heading outside. For students who need more support, this activity can be done in small groups with adult support.
Please don’t forget to rate this resource to let us know what you think.
Also be sure to visit my store and FOLLOW ME to see my new products and hear about upcoming sales!
Exploring what hides in the depths of the trees is a great way to look at habitats, classification and living things as well improving observation skills and sparking their interest in science and the world around them.
Get a large white cloth or tarpaulin and lay it out underneath a tree with branches you can reach. Shake the branches for several seconds. Students can now find and observe the different mini-beasts that have fallen from the tree.
It’s great if you’re able to provide microscopes and magnifying glasses to take a closer look. The students can keep a simple record of what they’ve discovered on the record sheets.
Extension activities: Older students could do some report writing on one of the mini-beasts they found.
Equipment needed:
Large white cloth / tarpaulin
Record sheets
Magnifying glasses (optional)
Microscopes (optional)
Please don’t forget to rate this resource to let us know what you think.
Also, be sure to visit my store and FOLLOW ME to see my new products and hear about upcoming sales!
This fun and visual sorting / cut and stick activity for recycling is a great addition to your sustainability or humans and the environment topic. Students will look at the items and sort them into the four main recycling materials (plastic, paper / cardboard, glass, and metal).
This resource works great both in small groups and individually. It’s great to encourage students to think about the kind of items they can recycle instead of throw into the trash.
You may also be interested in our pollution bundle.
Humans and The Environment: Pollution - HUGE BUNDLE
Please don’t forget to rate this resource to let us know what you think.
Also be sure to visit my store and FOLLOW ME to see my new products and hear about upcoming sales!
Rock pool hunts are great fun and easy to do. Print out the sheet for your students to take down to the beach and mark off the creatures and seaweeds as they find them.
It’s great if you can provide a magnifying glass so they can look at all the amazing details of the wildlife they find.
Please don’t forget to rate this resource to let us know what you think.
Also be sure to visit my store and FOLLOW ME to see my new products and hear about upcoming sales!