Outdoor Learning

Weekly Round-Up: November 26, 2017

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It is truly hard to believe that we are in the last week of November!
This year has flown by. 
I hope that you are feeling like you are ready to tackle the last few months before the holiday break!
I was hoping to post this last week but was unable. As a result, this post is a quick reflection on last weeks learning centers in our classroom. 

1. Math

We have been focusing a lot on sorting this past week. I used to store the straws and connectors in the classroom in one large bin.

We decided that we wanted to encourage proper use of these materials and my ECE teaching partner had a wonderful idea to place them in separate containers.

To be honest, this idea was absolutely brilliant!

Students can easily find the connectors and automatically are sorting while cleaning up. We discuss that we are sorting as they work, “What is your sorting rule?” and all of the children can answer. These buckets also take half the space on our shelves to store so if storage space is limited this is an added bonus!

2. Writing

I posted this week our writing continuum. We will be referencing this throughout the school year for students to be able to self assess their own work and see throughout the year where their writing started and how it has progressed!

This week we searched for specific examples from children in our classroom for each of the writing goals. Most of them are posted but not all. Once they are we will discuss this together with the class and learn together how we learn how to write!

We recently changed the layout of our classroom and now we have a writing area of our classroom where we can display all of our writing tools permanently close to students individual writing bins. It has been easier for students to reference their personalized writing resources by doing this which we are grateful for.

If you want to see the labels that I used, you can check them out by clicking here or on the second image below this text. 

3. Writing

We reused the game boards from Rumikub to play Go Fish with simple sight words! A binder was placed between students to prevent cheating! The children loved playing this game and even the non-readers asked to play along!

4. Building

Building with Lincoln Logs isn’t always the easiest for young children.

I am always amazed how students use materials differently when presented with additional objects to their play.

Here we added a few wood slices to the table with the Lincoln Logs. Many children ignored them but one student in particular found them to be a challenge! They created a “wall” all around the outside of the wood and then added a roof, using another wooden slice, to their building! At clean up time, he wondered how many of the small pieces needed to be removed for the wooden slice to fall down and collapse the building. We used long sticks to do this to prevent pinched fingers! It was a great inquiry!

5. Outdoor Learning

It is amazing how children are easily entertained by fake representations of what their parents use.

One of our team went to a local phone company and asked for their old, obsolete phones that they do not sell anymore. This is a great way to add to your outdoor learning collection without having to spend any money while making an addition to your dramatic play outdoors!

Check out my other Round-Ups here or  Follow me on Bloglovin’ to see more ideas for learning activities in kindergarten!

Reflecting Children’s Lives Book Review

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Our Kindergarten team has studied a book each year in a book club.

It is a great way to develop common language, support each other in our learning and give each other ideas to use in our classroom.

We recently studied “Reflecting Children’s Lives” by Deb Curtis and Margie Carter.

Overall, I found that it was a great book which for teachers who are just starting on their journey into emergent practice and a reflective book for teachers who are currently using this model.

Our team had a lot of “ah ha” moments where we acknowledged the growth from where we started years ago and could name how we are actively embracing this philosophy in our classrooms and as a team during outdoor learning.

My favourite chapter was the chapter 2 on Revitalizing the Environment.

The book highlights many principles to keep in mind to encourage an emergent environment but we noted in our group that some of the philosophies of the book are geared to a daycare toddler setting versus an actual Kindergarten classroom.

We had some great discussions about these differences and the importances of them.

These small reminders were great:

  • looking at the whole classroom from a Childs perspective
  • easily accessible learning materials
  • open-ended loose parts and materials
  • using diverse textures in materials, sensory and even lighting
  • ensuring a flexible classroom environment
  • reflect students lives
  • ensure to reflect multiple cultures in your room based upon the students in your class
  • be flexible
  • use natural materials
I would highly recommend reading it as a professional read to reflect upon your learning.

If you are interested in purchasing it I have a link to my Amazon affiliate where you can check it out by clicking on the photo of the book above. This simply helps support me with maintaining my blog expenses. 

Never-Ending Cone Hunt: A Twist on Hide and Seek

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Never-ending one hunt is one of my favorite never ending games to play outside with primary students. It is simply a game of hide and seek with balls and cones.

What you need?

More cones than you have students playing.
Enough tennis balls to hide underneath half of the cones.

Setup

Set up your cones on a field sporadically placed all over the place. Hide the balls underneath several of the cones.

How to Play

Students all start searching together to look under the cones to find a ball. They can only look under one cone at a time. If they find a ball they have to remove it and hide it under a different cone to hide it from their friends. So, they need to look under other ones to see if they are empty or they need to remember which ones they have recently checked that were empty in order to know where they can place the found ball. I usually stop at first after five minutes and then extend the time based upon the ability of the students to keep running.

Chicken Tag

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Chicken tag is a hilarious game for children to play during outside learning or during gym class.

It is a never ending game of tag.

Never ending games are always my favorite to quickly burn as they burn a lot of energy and have fun at the same time!

What you need:

2 flexible plastic chickens and 2 noodles for 20-3- students. Add more of each item to keep a similar ratio. This is perfect for inside or a warm day. If the chickens get cold they can hurt depending upon which brand you have.

How to play:

Pre teach how to tag with a noodle. Gently, below the shoulder and higher than the waist. Students with the chicken tag. Students with the noodle untag.

If a child is tagged with a chicken they must freeze and pretend to be a chicken by squawking and making their arms go up and down like a chicken flying. In order to be unfrozen the student with the noodle needs to gently tag the student! The kids think this is hilarious and it keeps the game fun! Change up the players frequently to keep interest as the taggers and those who untag will be tired quickly!

Have fun playing!

Toilet Tag: A Never Ending Tag Game

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Toilet tag is a hilarious game for children to play during outside learning or during gym class.

It is a never ending game of tag.

Never ending games are always my favorite to quickly burn a lot of energy and have fun at the same time!

What you need:

2 noodles and 2 plungers for 20-3- students. Add more of each item to keep a similar ratio.

How to play:

Pre teach how to tag with a noodle. Gently, below the shoulder and higher than the waist.

Students with the noodle tag. Students with the plunger untag.

If a child is tagged they must freeze and pretend to be a toilet.

They bend their legs, with their hands in a circle in front of their body, pretending that their arms are the toilet bowl.

The bent leg action helps build core muscles as students are in an unusual position compared to normal. When their arms are in front of them it helps students to develop their balance skills.

In order to be unfrozen the student with the plunger needs to gently plunge the students toilet bowl! The kids think this is hilarious and it keeps the game fun!

Change up the players frequently to keep interest as the taggers and plungers will be busy!

Alternate Version:

Have students put their hand up and students come pull their hand down to “flush” the toilet instead of needing a noodle. Anyone can “flush” the toilet!

Have fun playing!

Outdoor Learning: Exploring Paint

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Playing and exploring outdoors is one of my favorite ways to extend learning with my students.
We love to add color to our water bottles and spray them onto a variety of materials.

We have brought out mural paper, chart paper and even white sheets like what is shown in the images above.

All of these we attach to our fence and let the kids explore with their creations. 

Materials we used:

dead washable markers – creates vibrant colors which are washable
food dye – be careful as it can stain so only add a few drops
paint – add a couple drops of a water based paint to water and shake to mix the colors up!

Weather Caution:

Be sure to make sure that you do this on a hot day so that the paint dries quickly.

We have had staff leave students art outside after we go inside and it has gotten ruined or blown away creating litter on the school yard.

I firmly believe in modelling respect for the earth and teaching children at a young age to take care of it!

Outdoor Learning: Dance Party Fun

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One of my favorite activities to engage our students during our outside learning is to have a dance party. It doesn’t matter what time of the year it is, the children all love to dance and have fun together!

I have found that some students simply like to join in by dancing on their own but most of our students enjoy exploring their creative expression using ribbons. They create their own routines together, often explore beat and rhythm or have fun exploring different ways that they can control the ribbons through various movements and the wind!

We pull out our stereo player and let the kids choose what music they want to listen to or sometimes we have a predetermined song list that we play from. In order to have the music have more of a stereo effect so that it will carry further, we put the music player inside a cheap styrofoam cooler from our local grocery store which we always keep in our outdoor storage shed throughout the year with the ribbons. Ribbons are stored in a bucket which is easily pulled out to set up for the activity. We always make sure at clean up time that all the ribbons face upwards so that they do not get knotted at the bottom of the pail.

When dancing with our ribbons we have 3 simple rules:
1. Make sure you don’t hit a friend with the sticks (dowels).
2. Ribbons stay off of the ground (so we don’t step on them).
3. We never play with them in the rain or in puddles as it makes the wood moldy and destroys the ribbon.

How to make the ribbon wands:

You will need:
1/2″ diameter dowels
long ribbon strings – ensure there is no metal so that it won’t rust.
dowel caps so the ribbons will not fall off

Instructions:
Cut the ribbon into long lengths all a variety of different sizes.
Tie them onto the end of the dowels as tight as you possibly can so that it shouldn’t move around easily. I vary the lengths when I tie them so it is uneven.
Sometimes I’ll mix up colors or I’ll choose to stick with a color theme. Often times during our outdoor learning our students will change up which ones they use purely based upon the colors available!

How do you engage students in dancing activities during your outdoor learning time? I’d love to hear from you!

Planning for Outdoor Learning in Kindergarten

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I love collaborating with my other team members in our Kindergarten team and love that we can plan together for our outdoor learning.

We have a team of 14 staff members so this is a big collaborative effort!

Our Outdoor Learning Schedule:

40 minutes of outdoor learning first thing in the morning with a staggered entry for small group instruction.
40 minutes of outdoor learning at the end of the day.

Why this schedule?

This schedule provides fewer transitions in our day for students.

They only have to undress once during the day and get dressed to go outside at the end of the day.

We do not go outside for a recess but have two 40 minute nutrition breaks where students eat and then often do gross motor activities to help keep them focused for the day.

Teacher Engagement

During outside learning each teacher has a “role” which we sign up for. We have specific learning centers to engage students and others are floaters who help with runners, behavior management and any students who may need bathroom breaks etc.

All classes have two teachers, so we usually ensure that one team member is at a center and the other is floating.

As a team, we collaborate on a learning template very similar to what we use in our classroom.

We try our best to ensure we hit as many learning opportunities that we possibly can based upon the interests that we notice while we are outside learning together.

The following freebie shows a basic template that we use in our classroom and what we try to purposefully uncover while we are learning together. Click on the image to see it!

Learning Centres on our Plan
Science & Discovery
Math
Language
Paint & Visual Art
Music
Gross Motor: Field vs. Tarmac
Fine Motor
Water
Sand
Blocks & Building Materials

Making learning opportunities visible

At first, one team member took minutes and we documented what learning activities were being provided and which room was responsible for it. 
This member would print the page and post it in our shed as well as post it in our school conference for all the team members to print.  
We found this very purposeful but often found that we ran out of time for deeper collaboration together.

Google Drive To the Rescue!

In response to this need, we found it valuable to create a shared google document and all team members bring an iPad to add their ideas during our planning. 
This has allowed all of us to input our contributions quickly and we can all glance at the activities quickly and then are more purposeful in our discussions. 
Our meetings have been able to be more focused and we are all happy that we can go home quicker at the end of the day!
How does your planning differ? I’d love to learn how other teams collaborate together!

Four Frames Bulletin Board Set

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I love creating bulletin boards that represent the learning of the children in my classroom.

Our old curriculum was very subject bound.

At times we would have a writing, art, science or math focus on them.  I love the freedom of our new curriculum as it has changed to the Four Frames.

There are so many cross-curricular links and I love being able to show that off.

One of my personal favourite ideas is to make a collage of current photos and collages we have made of the learning in our classroom.

We have five different bulletin boards in my classroom so we use one board for each frame except we use two to separate demonstrating literacy and mathematical behaviours.

If you’re interested in checking these out, click on the image below to pick it up from my store!

There are five title pages and four pages with the corresponding expectations for each of the Four Frames.

The titles are identical to what I have in the photos above but the expectations look better in the download.

I hope you enjoy it and find it useful for your classroom!

Snow Provocations: Having Fun in the Snow

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Engaging in the snow is often our students favourite activity.

Usually for the first snowfall we do not set out anything to engage our students as they are filled with pure joy of playing in the snow with their friends.

After the initial “buzz” wears off we like to change up the learning environment to provide new opportunities for learning.

Spray Painting The Snow

Our students love to spray snowmen, pictures, words, patterns and designs in the snow!

The following image is a colourful snow fort! We reuse dried out washable markers and even have asked the whole school community for donations for our cause!


What you need: several good quality spray bottles, washable dried out markers, a tote to carry the bottles outside

Directions

The night before we go outside I place two to three dead markers with water into high quality spray bottle that will not leak and can withstand the cold without cracking.

Shake them in the morning and the colour will become more vibrant! Our spray bottles are in a little plastic tote which is easy to carry outside.

We usually have at least 5 bottles to spray but prefer more.

Painting Fun 

We have learned that we always have to give the students a lesson at not aiming at their friends bodies.

Only aim at the snow!

We usually set a timer for how long students can use the spray bottle. Some children easily share but often this needs to be teacher directed! I can usually refill the bottles with more water one to two more times before they no longer leach out any colour into the water. 

It is simple enough to empty the bottle, add new markers and refill with water ready go go for the next day of fun in the snow!

Snow Painting

Painting the snow is a simple provocation. All you need is snow, paint and water to spread the paint!

What you need:

Old paint brushes you don’t mind getting wrecked in the snow
A bucket to hold the trays of water paint
A jar filled with water 
Although this is a lot of fun, it can be very messy!

The top image above is the paint tray before the students started painting and the bottom image is at the end of our outside learning.

Be prepared for a little bit of clean up!

Snowmen Ornaments

This past year we used salt dough ornaments with our students. They loved using their creativity to paint them after they had pressed their fingerprints into their ornament to make the body of the snowman.

These ornaments must be dried out before you can paint them so be sure to safely poke the hole through before you dry them out.

Each ornament was beautiful and unique!

Wooden Snowflakes

We left a variety of different popsicle sticks out at the art table with glue and let the kids go wild. They did!

Snowmen Art

The day of our first snowfall we provided the following materials and note the amazing snowman art that resulted!

What you need: 3 different sizes of white paper,  1 blue background sheet,  1 little square orange piece, some glue and  tiny cup with a little bit of white paint with Q-Tips 
I hope you found some great ideas for activities to use with your students this winter!