We were invited to give the key note Margaret Collis Lecture at the ASE (Association of Science Education) Conference on the 15th January. It was a wonderful opportunity to speak to an audience of mainly primary school teachers about all of the exciting opportunities the natural world offers for teaching not only about science but right across the curriculum.
We were able to demonstrate how many of the fun and creative activities featured in our books are relevant to the curriculum and can easily be used in the school grounds or in a local park to deliver outdoor education on a regular basis on the doorstep. We believe that this approach gets over most of the barriers to taking classes of children outside. Click on the link below (on our website www.goingwild.net) to see a few slides showing a couple of ideas which we developed with a school in London, using the park next door to the school and the school grounds.
Going Wild ASE information 15 Jan 2016
Our key message to the conference was to stress the importance and benefits of reconnecting children with the natural world but also to excite them about all of the possibilities offered by the natural world for teaching and learning. The audience was very responsive and appreciative and we hope that they might now feel able to use the outdoors more creatively in their teaching.
If you are a primary school teacher, please use our books to deliver exciting lessons outdoors but we might suggest they don’t use the hooked stick for catching particularly wild runaway children!
