The day in the forest with the Year 2 class was such a great
experience! It gave me opportunity to really look at the benefits of forest
schooling and how different it is to your usual classroom.
The day gave me opportunity to show pupil’s how to make
cupcakes in orange skins, and begin to talk about irreversible change. The
original plan was to make eggs in the skin but then soon figured we needed
something which would really interest the children! We were aiming to touch
upon key ideas of irreversible change and how it works; we had to take into
consideration the children’s age and therefore the pitching of the content of
the teaching. The way we approached this was to ask children their thoughts on
cooking, and compared how baking a cake means that you wouldn’t be able to get
the mixture back. However melting ice is a reversible change and tried to take
this approach to give them something to apply the ideas to. We asked the
children to have a very hand on approach to the activity ensuring that they
were always engaged. They scooped the insides out of the oranges and made the
cake mixture, pouring it into the orange skins. Then Richard put the oranges
onto the fire to bake, at the end of their day children were allowed to take
one if they so wished.
On the other hand although the activity was successful it
did have its faults, ideally we would have more time and space to conduct the
activity in. We could have also perhaps pre scooped out the oranges as this was
not key to the learning objective of the activity and was quite time consuming,
messy and difficult for some of the pupils. Maybe a practise run ourselves may
have told us this but time was not permitting, however I do feel the activity
was overall a success as the pupils enjoyed themselves!
Jess Tracey.
No comments:
Post a Comment