We all know and understand the many benefits that outdoor education can have. It is not only beneficial to wellbeing but is also a great way to inspire and create engaging learning experiences.
In this blog we will explore teaching maths outside and share ideas and resources to create fun and engaging outdoor maths activities.
Taking Maths Outdoors
Maths is an ideal subject to take outside. It offers plenty of opportunities and the space to think creatively and generate new ideas to solve problems. The outdoors can be woven into everyday maths teaching to enhance mathematical understanding and provide a real-life context for learning.
Pupils will also develop important communication and collaboration skills as they move around and work with each other to solve mathematical challenges. Outdoor maths is perfect to bring the subject to life, allowing pupils to investigate and make discoveries with hands-on engaging activities. In this blog, we have shared a few ideas to help inspire you to teach maths outdoors.
Engaging Activities to Support Learning Maths Outdoors
You could begin your outdoor sessions with a fun active counting game that uses the space and gets everyone focused and ready for the lesson.
A good idea is counting on or back in different steps while carrying out an action. For example, count on in steps of ten starting with zero. When we say the first number tap our knees, when we say the next number jump on the spot with hands in the air. Keep counting together up to one hundred. Then repeat actions while counting back to zero. Children can count in steps of any size, and the activity could be used to reinforce times tables knowledge and understanding of patterns. Why not ask the children to identify odd and even numbers and reveal patterns in the sequence?
Exploring Symmetry in Nature
Outside you have the beauty of colours, patterns and shapes, making it an ideal space for spotting and learning about symmetrical patterns. You could:
- Take a walk around your local area and look out for patterns and symmetry that can be seen, such as the stones in a wall, or the markings on signs. Help children to spot them and record what they have found using cameras, taking rubbings, or creating their own pictures.
- Find everyday objects such as leaves or pinecones and discuss whether they show symmetry or not.
- Use natural materials found or humans to create your own symmetrical art designs or to create repeated patterns, such as stand, stand, sit, stand, stand, sit.
- Create laminated pictures of symmetrical patterns from the outside space and encourage the children to search for them.
- Lay a skipping rope on the ground to represent the mirror line and use leaves, twigs, stones, etc. to build each half of the design.
- Explore patterns on buildings and use the space to build your own walls and explore shape using large building bricks or other shapes.
Discovering Geometry in Nature
The world around us is made up of many different shapes, which makes the outdoors the perfect space for some shape spotting.
Find geometric shapes in plants, landscapes and buildings. Go on a shape hunt and identify, describe and compare the shapes found. Ask questions such as, ‘what shapes can you see in the brick patterns?’ You could also create shapes with natural items such as sticks and use them to explore and discuss the properties of shapes.
If you would like inspiration as to how to take learning outdoors with a shape building activity, check out Alfresco Learning’s blog: 7 ways to take the KS1 maths curriculum outdoors.
Creating a Maths Scavenger Hunt for Outdoor Learning
Everyone loves a scavenger hunt. Design your own maths themed scavenger hunt, incorporating problem solving challenges. Children could work in groups and collaborate to find the answers. Use clues to investigate number, shape, measures and solve problems.
Ideas for scavenger hunts could be:
- Collect specific quantities of natural items e.g. 5 leaves.
- Be shape detectives and find all the different shapes such as circles, rectangles, hexagons.
- Use tape measures to find items of specific lengths such as a stick that is 7cm long or measure the distance between trees.
- Find something that is larger or smaller than a 1 pence coin.
- Collect various sticks and leaves from the ground and then order them from the shortest to the longest.
- Use sticks to make a right-angle finder and find things around that are bigger than a right-angle (obtuse), smaller than a right-angle (acute) or things that are right angles.
- Set off on a number hunt. Take photos of where numbers are seen and record all the numbers on their journey. This is also a great activity for children to do with their family at home.
Children could use clipboards and checklists to collect their answers in different ways, such as creating a tally chart of the items found.
Enhancing Spatial Awareness Activities
The great outdoors also offers the space to help children develop their sense of position, direction and understanding of the properties of objects, such as their location, size and shape. Outdoor learning tasks could include:
Navigation Challenges
Create paths and routes around the outdoor space to support children with navigation. You could make an obstacle course and as the children move through it, provide a commentary to help them form a clear concept of spatial directions. The children can then make up their own routes around the course and give instructions for friends to follow.
Using Coordinates
Map the area onto a grid and use co-ordinates or language such as, above, below, between, next to, and identify objects and describe their position. They could also use compass directions to turn and face different directions and describe what they can see. For instance, ‘find north and then make a half-turn to the right-where are you facing now?’ ‘Turn 3 right-angles anticlockwise-what can you see now?’
Variations could include using degrees as commands, for example, ‘Turn 90 degrees clockwise from North’ or ‘Turn 180 degrees anticlockwise from South’. Increasing the number of compass points to eight, i.e. N, NE, E, SE, S, SW, W, and NW will further develop children’s skills.
Build 3D shapes outdoors
Working with shape on a larger scale helps to make it easier to see, visualise and explore the properties of shapes. First, go on a 3D shape hunt and when you discover the shapes get groups of children to recreate them using their bodies. They could also work together to construct the shape nets using materials found outdoors and count the edges and vertices.
Fun Outdoor Maths Games
Taking maths outdoors means that everyone can be active. Children will naturally use mathematical thinking and skills as part of their outdoor experiences and fun outdoor maths games can help to reinforce mathematical concepts.
Here are some ideas of different maths games that could involve setting challenges or keeping track of a score.
Relay races
Children can work in teams to solve maths problems at different stations. These could be quick mental maths challenges or puzzles. Use stopwatches for the races and teach pupils about estimating and measuring time.
Hoopla
Throw beanbags towards a hoop and score points for every beanbag that lands in it. The game could be extended by having more than one hoop to aim for with different values and calculating different scores or placing a bucket inside the hoop(s) and scoring more points for landing in the bucket. Alternatively use a pre-made resource, such as the TTS Beanbag Target Mat.
Skittles
Throw balls at the skittles and score a point for every skittle knocked down. Scoring could be made more difficult by numbering each skittle – you could use the TTS number cones for this activity.
Target Maths
Write a number on the ground or on the wall in chalk as the target to aim for. Invent different games and challenges to try and score this target number. An idea could be counting skips using a skipping rope. Children could do this individually or work together in a team. They could complete different activities and then combine their scores to total the ‘target number’, such as calculating how many star jumps each person needs to do to hit the target.
Board Games
Create nature-inspired board games such as noughts and crosses or draughts using natural items.
Engaging Outdoor Counting Activities
Build confidence with numbers and go on counting nature walks. These fun adventures can help to inspire a love and appreciation for the natural world.
Outdoor counting activities could include:
- A minibeast count with children using magnifying glasses to hunt for minibeasts and keep a tally of how many creatures they find. They could also tally how many legs they spot on the minibeasts.
- Choose a selection of different things for children to find outdoors. Head off on a nature adventure and keep a tally of how many times you see each item. Use the information to make graphs. Which item did you see the most/least of?
- Count how many steps it takes to walk between two specific landmarks.
- Build rock towers with collected stones. How many can be stacked before the tower falls?
- Pupils can create natural arrays by collecting found items and using them to create visual representations of multiplication tables, e.g. 3 rows of 5 stones for 3×5.
- Sticks and stones could also be used to represent tens and ones to demonstrate and explore place value. Pupils can make different numbers and compare them, which number is greater/least? How do you know?
- Explore number bonds using natural objects to find all the ways to make a number. Similarly, children can play around with a set of natural items and split them in different ways.
- Create a nature-based number line using sticks and stones or other natural objects to encourage visualisation of number sequences. Challenge the children to jump to specific numbers or use the number line to solve maths calculations by moving backwards and forwards along the line.
Using Measures to Explore the Outdoors
Outdoor learning offers many opportunities for hands-on measuring activities. This can support understanding of weight and distance in an interactive way.
Some examples of using measures outdoors include:
Exploring Length
Create opportunities for children to measure the length or distance in different ways. They could use tools with standard measures such as a trundle wheel, tape measures, or metre sticks, or alternatively use natural items as non-standard measures. They could measure the length of the playground, create and measure giant and fairy footsteps, measure plants or trees, lay out skipping ropes to measure a length, or collect sticks and try to find the longest and measure them using other natural items.
Children could also measure their own height in stones/pinecones/sticks by laying them on the ground and counting them to see how tall they are. Who is the tallest?
Exploring Weight (Mass) and Capacity (Volume)
The outdoors provides the space to weigh, measure, tip, pour and get messy! Children could use balancing scales to compare the weights of different objects they find. For example, find out how many horse chestnuts are equal to the weight of a stone.
To explore capacity, children could experiment with emptying and filling different sized and shaped containers and order them according to how much they can hold. You can also make a sand or mud cake using different sized spoons, cups, jugs to measure out the quantities.
Children could also make potions in a mud kitchen and follow recipes, with the support of mud kitchen accessories, to measure out the ingredients.
Exploring Time
It can be easy for time to pass quickly when learning outdoors, so teaching children to think about how what they can do or learn in a certain time is beneficial for providing context to everyday activities.
Here are some suggestions to explore and learn about time:
- Use stopwatches to see how long it takes to run from one point to another, or to hop 20 times.
- Children could work together to set one-minute challenges to see what they can do in one minute.
- Use natural found objects like sticks and stone to create a clockface on the ground and use it to show different times and answer time-related questions.
In Summary – Start Enjoying Maths Outdoors!
Maths is all around us. The great outdoors creates the chance to inspire and engage children in a different way with their maths learning. They can problem solve, explore shapes and patterns in nature, and develop calculation and reasoning skills through collaboration.
The outdoors also provides you with the space and opportunity to teach maths in new, creative, imaginative and engaging ways. To get started and inspired, check out our outdoor maths activity resources now!
