Fieldwork
Fieldwork in the school grounds
Making the Most of your School Grounds
The list of barriers to taking students out of lessons for fieldwork seems to increase year by year. If it's not timetabling it's cost or staffing or health and safety. To overcome these obstacles, the school grounds provide an ideal location for geographical study. They are free, no transport is involved, and you can get out and back in the space of a single lesson.
In this section, you will find a list of five quick and easy ideas for fieldwork in the school grounds that you can adapt and use with your students today!
Quick links
- Learning through Landscapes is a charity which works with schools to make the most of their grounds.
Mapping mobile phone reception.
- This activity is easily adaptable to your school grounds or local area
Fieldwork example
- Dick Bateman, a Geography AST from Bristol, here describes a fieldwork activity he has developed for Key Stage 3 students to survey and evaluate the environment of the school grounds. Read this article.
Fieldwork example
- Uffculme school in Devon has set up an electronic weather station in their grounds which feeds data to the school website, allowing pupils and the general public to access live (and some historical) weather data. Find out more about the project in this article.
- The BBC Weather website provides instructions for making a range of simple weather instruments.