Learning

At Vogrie, we enjoy incredible learning opportunities in the real world all year round.

In spring our children experience science stories first hand, witnessing animal and plant life cycles and planting own fruit and our vegetables. Through tracking their growth we develop our mathematical understanding, find shapes and repeating patterns in petals and leaves, count and sort what we pick and gain understanding of real money from our public market stall. Together we learn and make up songs about Spring and listen to the birds sing theirs and experience the sensory delight of wind and rain, sun, mist, frost and rainbows learning how and why these weather systems work.

In the summer, we might spend a day at the river, keeping cool in the heat, evaluating water flow compared to in other seasons, considering the incline of slopes and the sizes of rocks and branches and the placement of stinging plants to risk assess for themselves. We use, follow and make our own maps of the area to help us discover new places and make sense of our surroundings. Literacy is progressed as we learn new vocabulary for what we see around the park, and when we work together on challenge such as den building we speak, listen, and develop our communication skills.             

As autumn begins, we record the changes we see over time in a chart, or are inspired to compose a rhyming poem or create an autumn story. We mark make with mud or berries, practicing our emergent writing, or create an artwork or pattern from the abundance of found natural materials. The children might spend time reading non-fiction about the human body and animal skeletons after finding the bones of a bird while out on an adventure.  In windy weather we look into materials and technologies as we build a kite which will really fly, then document this using digital technologies to share with our peers. We use positional language to understand how to tie a knot that works, to support a friend to climb a challenging tree or to work together building something from loose parts.

Winter brings the chance to see and wonder about the shortening of days, the night sky and our solar system. Checking calendars, the clocks going back and the earlier darkness encourage the investigation of time, while we experience the dropping of temperature and how that looks as digits on a thermometer as well as how it feels and what it does to our environment and our own bodies. Returning to the pond we find there are no frogs to be seen, but we can measure the thickness of the ice and see what force it takes to crack it. To warm up, we learn how to make a fire, keep ourselves safe around it and put it out safely with respect for the environment. Our commitment to the local foodbank supports social studies learning, as do our adventures around the park where we find out more about its place in Midlothian’s history.