Outdoor Learning Day November 2021
Columbia Grange School Bonfire 2021
The children at Columbia Grange School were lucky enough to be able to enjoy a bonfire on the Discovery Park where they each had a turn at toasting a marshmallow.
The purpose of an open fire is to offer the children an acceptable risk activity to enhance their learning opportunities and own coping strategies. Encounters with certain types of risk help children to learn how to manage those risks. To help children with this they were first reminded of safety rules about being beside fire. We used symbols and signs to support their understanding. All of the children had a turn and all were able to demonstrate safe practice with the appropriate amount of support in place to ensure this was the case.
All of the children enjoyed the activity and were able to safely toast their marshmallow in the fire. Some children enjoyed singing campfire songs and some were very keen to share stories as they sat around the fire. We all had a lovely day and we took lots of pictures to share.
Jayne Littlewood
Senior teacher and Forest School leader
Alongside the bonfire classes also participated in other outdoor activities including:-
For outdoor Learning Class 1 collected some leaves and made fireworks using leaves,
Class 2 had great fun for Outdoor Learning Day, we enjoyed sparklers in our outdoor area and used spaghetti and a colander to make a bonfire as well as using shaving foam and food colouring to make sensory fireworks.
Class 3 lit sparklers in our outdoor area.
Class 7 What a fun day. We went outside to create our own firework patterns using chalks. We tried to do swirls and zig zag patterns.
Class 8 We made then collected tickets for the bonfire in the discovery park. We played a game of ‘find it’, we looked for natural objects in the adventure trail.
Class 10 really enjoyed outdoor learning day. We completed our Daily Mile walking in the morning and afternoon and we talked about what we could see and hear around us. We took some of our phonics work outside and practiced writing some of our letters. We also enjoyed relay races in maths using ‘Numicon’ resources to find and make numbers to 20.
Class 12 It was our educational visit bus slot, so we went and had fun at Plessy Woods park together.
