Virtual Outdoor Classroom Day

The Indian School-Second Shift

Virtual Outdoor Classroom Day

Children benefit greatly from spending more time outdoors amidst nature.  Keeping this in mind, the teachers of TFS observed Outdoor Classroom Day with a twist!

Outdoor Classroom Day is a global movement to inspire and celebrate outdoor play and learning. In response to the corona virus crisis, the movement looked a bit different in 2020. 

As the corona crisis continues unrelentingly, children around the world are spending more time indoors and in front of screens. Connecting to nature can therefore restore a sense of  well being to a far greater extent than in ordinary circumstances. For children, this connection is best made through play – whether outdoors or indoors with natural elements. Teachers therefore planned plenty of fun activities for their students in order to give them virtual experience of the outdoor classroom on 21 May, 2020.

The Pre-school teachers played a sensory organ game with their students, where the tiny tots were blind folded and asked to guess items such as lemon slice, raw mango, coffee powder, kidney beans, stones, squishy toys etc using their senses of touch, smell and taste.

The teachers of Pre primary did a creative craft exercise with their students where they asked the children to collect different waste items such as used cds, newspapers, pencil shavings, fallen leaves, dry petals, cardboard etc to craft a handmade photo frame.

Class I students were told to look out of their windows and observe the beauty of the nature/ hear the birds chirping, see the moving clouds, the hues of the sky etc., and then reproduce the scene on a sheet with paints. The children also made simple photo frames using the waste material they had at home.

Students of class II  crafted ‘nature crowns’ using leaves, twigs etc.  Some even drew the crowns. Some other children gave old garments  a makeover by printing on them with flowers and plants. 

And last but not the least, the students of class III made masks of jungle animals and wrote short poems on them using rhyming words.

The students were delighted by all the activities and seeing the beaming faces, their teachers too were overwhelmed.