A kind of teaching you are never trained in.
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15 / 04 / 2008 | Author: dnorris
A kind of teaching you are never trained in.
No one ever gets trained in how to teach out of doors.
I have known junior teachers who have organised a treasure hunt for young pupils; I have seen classes doing mapping exercises in a village high street relating to their geography studies; I have heard of secondary school teachers who have sent rockets into the sky in science lessons.
For my own part I have taken children out to inspect the results of a small dam that was breached after a storm. We went to study the force of water. I have taken children outside to study an odd phenomenon, namely a circular rainbow. I even remember giving up the unequal struggle of gaining attention when a small plane circled the farm next to the school. It was crop spraying. So we went out to watch.
However, most of these lessons were done on the spur of the moment or at short notice. They were not time-tabled as a regular event.
When teaching in hot countries such a lesson can be built into the curriculum.
I had half an hour of PSHE out on the grass after a literacy hour and numeracy hour twice a week. It broke up the routine and helped sustain concentration. It happened at the best part of the day and the sunshine was predictable. The infant school teacher finished off her day with a story under the tree next to the school gate, and the week ended with an assembly outdoors under the flagpole. The final activity in that school was a hearty rendering of the national anthem.
Sadly the scope for doing something similar in the U.K. is limited. Take a look at any school playground. It is usually open to the elements. It is usually wide open to the wind. It is usually wide open to the snow, and wide open to the rain. In short there is no cover.
If there were it would be perfectly feasible to take some of the lessons outside.
However, even if you have a mind to incorporate a little bit of fresh air into the lesson you still need to establish a few basic ground rules.
Sporting activities aplenty take place in the open air and they have their sets of rules.
We had a set of three cricket nets positioned side by side. They managed to produce any number of near-misses and helped underline the need for safety.
When running cross country races we had a seating plan for those who had finished. This helped us to understand the need for organisation.
When we organised the swimming gala at the open air swimming pool we had a points system based on the contribution of those who had not been picked for the house teams. Each pupil gained a point for their house if they just swam a length in the preliminary heats. That helped everyone to understand the need for co-operation.
Such were the ground rules for sport. There was a similar set for lessons out in the open.
We had a code of practice for carrying chairs properly. Obviously we arranged our seats in a circle, but out of doors it was so much easier for small groups of children to work far away from the main group, and they had to carry them about without causing accidents.
We had clear signal for regrouping. We set out areas we were going to work in. We set down levels of acceptable behaviour and of acceptable co-operation. In my school we even had a correct procedure for dealing with animals. This meant that we would not be distracted by monkeys but we might be distracted by mosquitoes and we would move if there were some red ants crawling up the chairs.
