The local vegetable market could be an equally exciting place full of new sights and sounds! The doctor’s clinic, bus depot, post office and police station could all introduce children to an unfamiliar but interesting world, teaching them many new things. Small, local field trips as part of the learning process reinforce the knowledge the children have gained in the classroom and push them to ask more questions and build further connections with things that they already know. Children also learn to manage themselves and learn to be with others through these experiences.
National Curriculum Framework for Foundational Stage-2022
Field Trips-Learning Math through Nature Walk -National Curriculum Framework for Foundational Stage-2022
I often take my entire class to the nearby park for a ‘Nature Walk’. I usually start with asking my children to close their eyes and hear all the noises and see if they could name them. There are many possible ways I can engage my children here on. For example, we go around to find five things that are bigger than they are (e.g., tree, swings, car, gate, fountain) and five things that are smaller than them (e.g., pebbles, leaves, sticks, worms, butterfly). As we go around, I ask them to remember names of these things and how they look so that when we go back to the classroom, we can fill it in our worksheet.
I find this a great activity to break the monotony of sitting in a classroom and to make learning more fun and a very useful way to engage them in important concepts like sorting and comparing objects around them according to various properties like size.
Things that are:
Smaller than me Bigger than me
Reference
National Curriculum Framework for Foundational Stage-2022
https://ncert.nic.in/pdf/NCF_for_Foundational_Stage_20_October_2022.pdf