Wild Spaces in schools: Using your space for outdoor learning

Written by Angus Walker, Bristol and Weston Wild Spaces Project Officer

Since I started helping schools in Bristol and Weston make Wild Spaces in their grounds last February, something I’ve heard a lot from teachers is that, while they know how beneficial it is, they wouldn’t feel confident taking a group of children to do some learning outdoors. They worry that, if they were to do this, they’d need lots of knowledge about nature, lots of expensive equipment, and lots of time.

But this is not the case! I recently led a training event at Grow Wilder in Bristol for a group of primary teachers which aimed to break some of these barriers down and show that, to lead a fun and inspiring outdoor learning session, you don’t actually need any of these things.

In the morning session, we used free apps like iNaturalist and iRecord to help us identify plants and butterflies. Apps like this are great to use with children – you can upload a picture and the app will suggest what species something is likely to be. In my experience, they are very accurate. They also take the pressure off the adult facilitating the session. If a child asks you what something is and you don’t know, you can just get out your phone or tablet and make a game of identifying new things.

In the afternoon, everybody took part in three fun outdoor learning activities. The first two, ‘tree poetry’ and ‘tree maths,’ were curriculum-linked. In these activities, trees are used as inspiration to write a short poem and to teach different measuring techniques. Neither of them require any specialist equipment or bags of time, just some bits of old cardboard, some pens and 20 minutes!

The final activity was focused on wellbeing. Participants were given a card with an emoji on and asked to go off around the site and find a natural object that, for them, corresponded to that emoji (happy, sad, angry etc.). We then took 15 minutes to discuss why people chose the object they had. For children, this is a great activity for developing emotional articulation skills, and once again requires very little planning and no kit.

Before going home, we discussed other easy, low-key opportunities in a normal school day for taking children outside to learn. Quiet reading and practicing times tables were popular suggestions. Doing this wouldn’t require any extra planning for an already busy teacher. It would just be a case of doing a small part of a lesson outside, giving children the chance to connect with nature, which we know plays such an important role in both cognitive development and wellbeing.

Resources for the activities mentioned above, as well as lots of other outdoor lesson ideas, can be accessed for free here: https://ltl.org.uk/free-resources/

Butterfly Conservation also has lots of wonderful free learning resources for all ages on our Discover and Learn platform: https://butterfly-conservation.org/discover-and-learn