Are you looking for ways to enhance your curriculum? To be more inclusive for your neurodivergent children? Then let The Muddy Puddle Teachers help.
Here are a few of our secrets:
The Rope Method
Any picture a child has to make inside the classroom can be created outdoors; you just have to think big. We often ask children to draw pictures, illustrations and diagrams to represent their learning. But have you thought about taking this area of learning outdoors? The children can use more than just their fine motor skills in this activity if they take it outdoors. This is the joy of teaching outside the cross-curricular benefits, which are enormous.
How to use the Rope method?
Place the children in small groups and hand them a rope. This could be a plain coloured rope, the type you use for climbing, or a coloured one. A skipping rope will do, but you must tie several of them together. They can be cheaply purchased on Amazon and come in different lengths; you need at least 8m length ropes. Ask the children to work as a team to create the desired picture flat on the floor you want them to achieve. For example, children in their early years may learn about ‘themselves’ and you ask them to make a person flat on the floor using a rope. The rope is not easily manipulated, so it will push them into turn-taking and working together.
Extend and Support
Extend with chalk if you are on cement and ask the children to write captions or describe the process. If you are on grass or astroturf, use rocks and chalk to weave in English skills.
Reflect
This also becomes an excellent communication and language lesson, so ensure that every group talks about their picture and explains their learning to the other children.
2. The Bamboo Method
Often, indoor practices can easily be translated outdoors and impact those objectives more because of the power of the cross-curricula and socialisation skills the outdoors brings. For example, grids! We use grids a lot as teachers to help children organise their learning, such as phoneme frames, tens grids, number lines, coordinates, whole and part models, fractions, and SPAG.
How to use the Bamboo Method?
Place the children in small groups and ask them to use 1m bamboo canes to make the desired grid, depending on the objective they are working on. Ask the children to make it flat on the floor and to do it together as a team. This could be a three-box storyboard, a tens frame, or a board game with many boxes.
Extend and Support
If on cement, use chalk to write in the grids. For example, you may ask the children to write out the word ‘cat’ on a phoneme frame, one letter per box. However, if you want the children to reuse the grid, using stones and chalk pens is the best option. Ask the children to write their letters on these and then place them in the boxes. Alternatively, in a tens frame, for example, natural resources can be used to make the units or represent the numbers.
Reflect
This also becomes an excellent time for children to use mathematical language and explain their learning, which is an excellent link for depth of knowledge. If a child can explain their learning, we know they have understood, which is far more impactful than writing on a worksheet, where we can not always tell if they have genuinely understood!
Written by Sarah Seaman BSc/PGCE/MA – Outdoor Learning Consultant/Author/Podcaster and CEO The Muddy Puddle Teacher Limited
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