Outdoor Education Week in the Middle Syndicate

The Year 3 and 4 children have been mixed together into new groups this week to do lots of Outdoor Education activities.

On Monday we learned how to read a compass and map so we could do orienteering. A boy on youtube showed us how it's done. We learned about north, south, east and west directions. You have to line your map up with North on the compass, then you can start finding things. We've been doing lots of mapping activities are are getting pretty good at this. Today we learned to use a piece of string to measure a path on a map, then use the scale on the map to convert our measurement into kilometres.

We have also been learning about painting. First we looked at some paintings by Impressionist painters. They did lots of their paintings outdoors. We had to experiment with making different brush strokes, using brushes, ice block sticks and our fingertips. Then we tried doing painting in this style. Our art works are really exciting. We'll be able to display them in our own school art exhibition.

It's been raining lots and our trip to the Cambourne walkway on Wednesday was postponed due to stormy weather. We are hoping that the weather will be fine tomorrow so we can talk a walk around Pahatanui inlet - there are lots of interesting things to paint there. Next week we will be visiting an exhibition of Impressionist paintings at Te Papa. We can compare our art works with theirs!

This afternoon we've been putting up tents. The people at the sides had to hold the edges really tightly so the wind didn't blow the tent away. It took a while to work pout where to put the poles but in the end we got the tent up. We went inside to see what it would feel like.

There's lots to do outdoors and our Outdoor Education week has been lots of fun.