Forest School Maths

Any maths you can do inside, you can do outside too!

Wild Math Curriculum is a brilliant resource for Foundation to Grade 4.  It covers very similar content to the Australian Curriculum.

I recently put together an outdoor maths kit with my favourite resources so that we can include more maths when we go on nature walks.

In our outdoor maths kit I included tools for measuring and recording.  Complete list at the end of this post!

My younger son Roo painted cards with fractions, decimals, percentages, large numbers and negative numbers (plus a few blank ones!).

They're great to use on an outdoor number line, or for working out equations in the dirt.

We drew a graph in sand and started putting our nature finds directly into the columns.  Now my older son S-Man is trying to work out a statistically valid method for estimating absolutely everything on the beach.

When I'm out walking with Roo we try to find the best trees to hug.

That invites mathematical questions:  What's the circumference of the tree?  Can we work out the diameter of the tree from the circumference?  How can we measure the height of the tree using its shadow?

Roo in particular seems to need time in nature to de-stress.

S-Man wanted to know if there's a relationship between rock pool size and distance from the ocean.  Here they are measuring rock pools, while lunch is cooking in the billy:

Those are the kinds of days I imagined and looked forward to when I was pregnant with my first child.  *Content*

Here are my must-have tools for Forest School maths:

• a flexible measuring tape
• dice
• a ruler
• chalk
• rubber bands
• numbered rocks (with some operation signs, too) 
• a permanent marker for writing on rocks and leaves 
• a large protractor 
• about fifty gumnuts (or shells... small natural items)
• a couple of small buckets 
• string 
• paper bags
• clipboard and mini note-pad
• graph paper
• cards - blank and numbered

Fraction sticks are another great idea which we haven't tried yet.  

We also have our nature journals and other nature study tools which we keep in our nature study backpacks.

Have you tried any outdoor maths ideas?  What would you put in a Forest School kit?  Please share in the comments.

For another outdoor idea, try making one of our birdfeeders.  THANK YOU for visiting our blog!