Podcast 404, Teaching and Learning Outdoors with Paddy Madden (21-9-20)

On this week's programme I speak to Paddy Madden about teaching and learning outdoors. Among the topics we discuss are:

• How weather engages the senses when we learn outdoors
• Benefits of teaching outdoors
• Forest bathing
• Noticing Nature
• Cloud watching, listening to the sound of birds, smelling flowers.
• Daily 15-minute walkabout
• Teaching outdoors across the curriculum
• Book: Sue Waite Children Learning Outside the classroom
• A silly symphony
• Preparing for outdoor learning
• Learning outcomes
• Ways of Knowing by John Quinn
• A spiral curriculum – revisiting topics at a more complex level
• Teaching outdoors in September
  • What to do when a wasp enters your classroom
  • Spiders
  • Planting a square metre of wheat
• Integration across the curriculum using topic of wheat
• Painting – called The Gleaners (I mistakenly called it “The Garners” in the recording)
• Places to visit at this time of year
• Fruit and seed walk: Dry fruit (e.g. helicopters, nuts) and succulent fruit (blackberries, rowan berries, sloes)
• How school grounds can sometimes be barren
• Paddy’s vision of ideal school grounds
• Creating raised beds in a school grounds
• Furniture for outdoors learning
• Making a pond safe for a school setting
• Making clipboards from recycled corroboard
• How to position a bird box correctly
• The value of a compass in school for showing directions
• Why he dislikes terms such as a “bug hotel” or a “bug viewer”
• Working outdoors in an urban environment
• Using window boxes to grow food
• Using binoculars with early finishers
• The “Engage with Nature” website
• Nature as a stage
• The value of unstructured play
• Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv
• John Feehan’s books
• Richard Louv: "The more high-tech we become, the more nature we need."
• Sacha Hamilton, the Duchess of Abercorn and activities of the Pushkin Trust