Three FREE Learning Activity Guides, one for every comfort level
A complete learning activity guide for each stage of your Thinking Outside practice: Starting Out, Going Further, and Digging Deeper. Each guide is a printable PDF with five teacher pages (including an assessment tool) and a set of nature journal pages for students, sent to your inbox.
These are the lessons I hand to teachers who tell me they are not the nature teacher. I was not either. Each one runs on an ordinary schoolyard, needs nothing you have to buy, and fits inside one block. Subscribe once, and all three arrive in the welcome email, followed by new posts as they publish.
Starting Out
A Listening Walk
The lesson I give any teacher who is nervous about going out. No equipment, any schoolyard, any weather. You read a book, walk slowly, stop, and listen. Back at the door, the class tells you what they heard, and you have your first list of things to teach from.
Kinder to Primary · about forty minutes with the read-aloud and the sharing circle · any season. The thinking behind it is in What Is a Listening Walk?
Going Further
Which Tree Knows You Best?
A tree trail for a class that already has a tree they visit. Students lead the class from tree to tree and introduce each one, then the class walks the trail again with one sense at a time, touch first. It is the lesson from the middle of the Trees Collection, the one where the yard stops being scenery.
Primary · thirty to forty minutes per walk, over several walks · any season. It follows on from What Is a Learning Trail?
Digging Deeper
The Inquiry Trail
Students choose the special places on the yard, name them, and map them on a drop cloth. Then the trail asks two questions at every stop: who lives here, and how do you know? What the class finds becomes the question they follow next.
Kinder and Primary · one block to start, then it keeps going · any season. Read about the approach in What Is Environmental Inquiry?
What is in every guide
The story of where the lesson came from.
Run it: the lesson itself, written to be read once the night before.
Connect it: a page to tick the curriculum concepts you are teaching and note the vocabulary to pre-teach.
Observe: a blank observation page for noticing, not grading.
And a bonus set of black-and-white nature journal pages for students, with a Try This at Home page for families.
Print the teacher pages in colour once and photocopy the student pages as many times as you need. Licensed for use in one classroom. Please share the link, not the file.
Not sure where you are on the path? The home page sorts it out in a minute. Or read the blog.
Thinking Outside 