Ever feel like you want to do some outside classroom learning? Now that the temperatures are rising, I find myself wanting to have class outside a lot! But it’s not always easy to come up with useful activities for students, and tasks that their learning benefits from, instead of it just being an excuse to be outside more. Plus, I want my students to see that I gave the activity some thought, and it’s not just me caving to their desire to enjoy the sun.
What useful language learning tricks do I have up my sleeve for the outdoor classroom, you ask? I will share them with you below. But first, be mindful of weather conditions and student safety. Have them use sunscreen and bring water if they’re going to be outside for a long time. And make sure parents and admin have given permission. And then, enjoy!
What is learning outside the classroom?
Learning outside the classroom environment means basically anything that can’t be done in a classroom. This can mean going outside of the building but on the school grounds, in actual nature, or the town or city, or being within the school building, but just not in the classroom itself.
Outdoor classroom ideas
Some outside classroom activities you could consider doing:
- Photo ops: have students take photos of things you want to make visual. I play Words in the Wild with them where I’ll have them take pictures to match vocabulary words I want them to revise, upload the photo to Padlet and add an explanation as to why and how the picture matches the word. Or get them to take photos depicting a grammar point. I love doing this for prepositions (locations of things), the present progressive, the first or zero conditional, and adjectives and adverbs, for example.
- Field trips: educational outings to historical sites or museums, etc. to learn directly from the environment. Have students describe what they’ve learned.
- Outdoor experiments: have students conduct an experiment and comment on the sequence of events.
- Nature walks: go on guided walks through natural settings, like the forest, the beach or botanical gardens, and have them describe what they’re seeing.
- Physical education: have students play a sport or do another physical activity and have them describe each other’s movements. Or have them read the instructions to a game they’ve never played and figure out how to play it.
- Reading outside: speaks for itself. Make sure they each have a book or something else to read.
- Outdoor conversations: have a discussion in a great big circle in which everyone participates. This is more of an opportunity kind of thing, because it’s too much of a hassle for me to move chairs in a circle in my classroom.
So these are the ways I make outside classroom learning happen with my students. See if you can use any of this in your lessons!
