Outdoor learning

Sheep Week!

13th March 2024

Last week we welcomed sheep to Reception and Queen’s Hill! The children helped to look after them, made sure they have enough hay and water and helped to feed the ewe. As the sheep became more comfortable in the field, some children even got to stroke the lambs. Alongside learning about the sheep and farming, they have also been learning ‘Mary had a little lamb’ and made a personalised song using their name and pet or animal.

Everyone at school was very sad to see Baarbara, Baarbie and Baarnaby leave us!

Outdoor Classroom visit

8th October 2023

We have been learning about the changes that Autumn brings in Reception and so we decided to see if we could find any evidence of Autumn arriving in Queen’s Hills. The children worked in pairs and hunted for Autumn items from a checklist. All of the children did super listening and showed our 3 school rules of Ready, Safe and Respectful!

Hapazome: Outdoor Learning inspired by Japanese art

17th January 202313th January 2023

In Outdoor Learning, to tie in with our art topic about dying materials, we learned the Japanese craft of hapazome. The Year 6s collected fresh leaves and safely used mallets to bash the colour onto triangles of cotton material. Some children made their own tools out of chunks of bark and stones to hold down the material in the wind. They discovered the lighter they tapped with the mallets the more detail their prints revealed.

Quite literally meaning ‘leaf dye’, hapa-zome is the Japanese technique of smashing flowers and leaves into fabric. The plant matter is often arranged into a mandala, but you can create any pattern you like. Be sure to use fresh, juicy plants though; these will leave the best imprint.

If you type ‘Hapazome’ into Google you could find some inspiration to try this over the weekend!

12th October 202211th October 2022

The year 1 children went to the on site outdoor classroom to see what seasonal changes they could find. Children noticed that some trees had no leaves and we found some brown, crunchy leaves on the ground. They then drew and wrote about their observations.