Outdoor Learning

ECO Garden Project

Clean Beam

As part of their project on ‘Plastic Dagenham’, Year 4 stepped out into the eco area to see how plastic is affecting our school. They collected different materials that had blown into our school grounds from our surrounding area’s and we have been discussing in class how this could impact Beam.

8th January 2018

Year 4’s first topic of 2018 is Living Things and Their Habitats, and we’re really hoping that lots of our learning can take place outside. To help us learn the most about living things, we’ve started our topic by looking at the habitats outside and seeing if we can improve them. We noticed that lots of birds visit our school, so we’re decided to feed them each week, especially as it’s so cold in the winter.

Keep your eye out for birds over the next few months- you could even take part in the RSPB’s National Bird Watch Week.

12th December 2017

With the arrival of the snow this week, children in year 4 have been recording the weather each day in maths, and trying to find out what the perfect conditions for snow are.

Over in Year 5, children were visited by some WWII experts and a Home Front Bus as part of their learning about the war and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.

Outdoor Learning Week

This term Beam held an Outdoor Learning Week, where all classes took to the outdoors to complete their different lessons, from literacy through to ICT. We had a great week, got messy and all learnt something new.

In Reception, we all took part in a Sound Hunt, listening out for all of our phonics sounds and in Year 1, we made potions and pies using materials from outdoors as part of our learning in Literacy.

Similarly, in year 2, we took our latest book, Stick Man by Julia Donaldson, into the outdoors to create our very own Stick Man.

Year 3 focused on History, recreating Stone Henge outdoors, whereas Year 4 used the playground to create huge mazes, before programming a BeeBot through them.

Perhaps the most fun was had by Upper KS2, where Year 5 deepened their understanding of reversible and irreversible changes in science through cooking over a fire, and eating their irreversible change with yummy jam!

Lastly, to end our Outdoor Learning week, we commemorated the fallen soldiers on Remembrance day with an outdoor assembly where we laid our poppies in our Remembrance garden.

Beam County Primary School is top of the class for Learning Outside the Classroom

Beam County Primary School has shown itself to have a strong commitment to providing excellent learning outside the classroom (LOtC) to its pupils by achieving a national LOtC Mark (Bronze). Awarded by the Council for Learning Outside the Classroom (CLOtC), LOtC Mark (Bronze) accredits those schools that have a strong awareness of the benefits of providing frequent, continuous and progressive LOtC experiences to all pupils and have begun to integrate LOtC into the life of the school.

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