Please don't kill anything...

The sun is shining! This can only mean one thing for we brave and ever-adventurous NQTs – outdoor lessons!

My philosophy is we need to make the most of it, so I decided to take any opportunity to plan an outside lesson. At first it was tricky trying to think about how to use the outdoor space in a way that would fit with the learning objectives in this term’s scheme of work, but there are many options for developing mathematical understanding out of doors; measures, data collection and people maths to name a few.

My maiden teacher voyage into the leafy world beyond the classroom walls involved a lesson on estimation with a group of year 7s. In pairs, pupils were given a checklist of objects to find that they thought (no measuring equipment allowed!) might be approximately a certain length. This may sound easy, but you would be surprised how many pupils think that a 20cm twig might actually be about 5cm.