Outdoor Learning Literacy and Maths Activities for the garden

Are you keen to find ways to teach kids English and Maths outdoors? Learning Literacy and Numeracy Outdoors seems a whole lot more fun! If you’re homeschooling or looking for ways to get your kids outdoors but also learning. Here are lots of fun ideas to teach kids English and Maths in the garden with outdoor activities! All of these literacy and numeracy teaching ideas are easy to set up in a garden or a park or you could take them further afield! Why not decamp your homeschool into a natural area and spend a day in the woods learning in a new environment? That should make the English and Maths more memorable with lots of engaging activities! See below for all our outdoor teaching ideas using the natural world and if you want to try a fun homeschool science activity – we love this Mud Explosion Science Experiment for Kids.

Outdoor Education Ideas for Kids

Luckily there are lots of fun resources and practical ideas for parents to use at home to support English and Maths learning that help your children to learn without feeling like their learning! Using games and outdoor resources helps make Maths a more realistic concept for children. Children need objects they can feel, move around to help them learn Maths. For example, as Juliet Robertson, author of Messy Maths: A Playful, Outdoor Approach for Early Years states they can’t understand what a right angle is unless they’ve seen and felt one.’ Natural materials and natural treasures like sticks, stones and seed pods are brilliant materials that can be used for counting and measuring. Natural objects and different experiences makes learning more memorable!

Fun Outdoor Math Games

• Noughts and Crosses is a great Maths game and can be played with acorns, shells or other nature items
• Trying changing up noughts and crosses and replace the symbols with numbers, then see if you can challenge kids to make each row add up to a certain number.
• Ever played lines and boxes on paper? It can also be played with chalk, sticks and stones! Make the grid using stones as the dots and cut sticks for the lines or use chalk. Put stones at the corners, then remove the sticks. Take turns to replace them as the game progresses. Take turns to draw a line or use sticks to connect two adjacent pebbles either vertically or horizontally. When a player makes the fourth line to make a closed box, then mark this with the player’s initial letter. The same player an extra turn. The winner is the player with the most boxes.

Outdoor ideas for teaching Phonics, letters and Numbers

Make a 10 Frame out of twigs and nature parts.

A nature hunt to build 10 frame is a great way to get children to see numbers and manipulate them to work out the relationships for number bonds as well as use those basics to understand place value in the future – see more in this post from Rainy Day Mum.

Best fun Outdoor Maths Activities

Use Natural Resources for Counting

Liven up learning numbers by using fun activities nature resources in an outdoor area for counting. This idea is from @Oh.mylittlecorner on Instagram.

Making Nature Numbers and Letters

Using Nature materials in a natural environment to make numbers and letters is a great way to help kids memorise them. For younger children, you can give kids hands-on experience you can trace the letter or number in the ground first. Or use chalk to do your maths on the pavement!

Construction Letter and Number Recognition

Take your child’s construction toys to an outdoor sandpit. They can use their diggers to search for numbers or letters or words hidden in the sand! You can use wooden letter or numbers for this or simply write digits on paper and hide them in the sand. Why not try hiding letters (or spellings or word definitions for older children) in the sandpit? This is also a fun outdoor idea for teaching spelling!

Car and Garage

Using toy cars, label them with different letters or phonics sounds. Then label some ‘garages’ (these could be cardboard boxes or made out of lego) with the same sound/ letter and your preschooler could match them and ‘park’ their car in the matching letter/ number ‘garage’.

Number or letter Hunt

Hide Numbers around the garden and encourage your preschooler to find them.

For an alternative to the traditional number or letter hunt, and if it’s winter where you are, you can try – you could try this an Ice treasure Hunt!

Outdoor Learning Activities for Literacy

Writing Recipes

Practice writing recipes or instructional writing by making Nature meals first! Ask your children to create a nature recipe for example making ‘Mud Pies’ or ‘Acorn Ice-cream’ or ‘Leaf Casserole’. Once they’ve created a pretend Nature Meal, you can teach them to add amounts to write up recipes such as 100g Mud, 2 teaspoons of grass and a sprinkle of petals……. For more fun nature potions – check out our ideas for Mud Kitchens Post.

Create a Poe-tree

Encourage creative writing by writing poems on gift-tags, gift labels and hang them from a tree to create a Poe-tree!

Outdoor Learning Ideas

Nature Story Craft

To encourage reading and writing, children could create a nature picture in the real world which helps them to visualise their story. After creating with nature, they could write it up as a story or playscript.

Writing and drawing Nature Journal

Fun Resources to teach kids literacy and numeracy

Have an outdoor classroom day! Practise writing and labelling skills by starting a Nature Journal. See here for lots of Nature Journal Prompts.

If you’d like to start Nature Journalling with your kids and develop their writing skills in a different way – try my Nature Adventure Journal for kids printable. This Nature journal contains everything you need to have magical outdoor adventures with your little explorers. If you’re looking to get your kids to play outside more – there are lots of easy nature journal activities here to inspire kids to explore nature’s wonderland in the great outdoors from cloud watching and an outdoor scavenger hunt to designing their own garden and rock pooling.

Outdoor Maths Activities

For some children (myself included!) Maths can be a difficult subject to engage with, things like learning times tables by rote can be a real turn-off for children, but taking Maths lessons outside can make numeracy a lot more fun for kids. Luckily there are lots of great ways you can embrace outdoor maths in your garden! Try creating an obstacle course where at each ‘station’ your child has to do a sum or some maths problems. This is an excellent way of getting some physical education in too! You can find more ideas for outdoor games here that are easy to adapt to include children’s interests and wild learning opportunities!

Making 2D Geometry Shapes

Make 2D Geometry shapes out of sticks and other nature materials to practise learning about shapes but also angles, sides and vertices. More explanation in this idea from The Wise Owl Factory.

Make a Rain Guage

Make a rain gauge from a plastic bottle to practise learning about capacity and amounts. You could extend this activity by learning to write a bar graph to measure the rain that falls over the course of a month.

Water Squirter Number Sentences for Mental Maths

To make Maths a whole lot more fun outdoors, write a variety of numbers on toilet tubes, read out some sums and ask your kids to squirt the correct answer with a water gun!

For more English and Maths Outdoor Learning Activities – check out this brilliant pack of resources from Wild Forest School.

Looking for ideas to teach Science in your garden? Here are lots of Science experiments you can do at home or in your garden! and one of our favourites is the Mud Exploding Monsters for Kids!

Outdoor Learning Resources for Kids

Here are some of our favourite learning resources for kids that can easily be used outdoors.

Story Box (age 4+)

This is a fabulous game/ 8 foot long puzzle for developing spoken language as it encourages kids to make up stories as they go. The box contains 20 cards, printed on both sides, which can be interchanged, allowing for all kinds of plots. With three alternative endings so you always tell a different story each time you play!

Dixit Board Game (age 6+)

Dixit is probably one of the most unique board games I’ve seen recently. It’s all about using your imagination and skills of interpretation. Dixit comes with 84 unique cards, each with wonderful, vivid and sometimes quite surreal artwork on them. Players have to describe their cards in a sentence. Players have to secretly vote using tokens to try and guess the storyteller – a great game to practise descriptive techniques and build creative writing skills. Here are our other favourite board games for families!

Magicube Word Building (age 3+)

These great magnetic cubes can be used by very young children to simply build with at first and then for preschoolers and those learning to read – you can use them practice phonics and sounds. This can be built up to very simple words to help children start learning to read. This is a great tactile learning resource for literacy which is wipeable so perfect for learning outdoors and outdoor exploration.

Sum Swamp (age 5+)

This is another brilliant game from Learning Resources where kids are learning without even knowing it just through outdoor play! It’s perfect for homeschool to practise maths skills. This numeracy board game helps children understand number sentences and practise the skills of subtraction and addition. My kids really loved the cute swamp creature play pieces – it’s beautifully construction game that will last 4 children playing with it!

It’s a great learning experience!

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