Reflection
Teaching outdoor education provides learning opportunities for students that relate to real life situations. It assists them to understand better, to think critically, and to control their own learning pace by communicating, collaborating, and interaction with their peers to acquire new capabilities. It provides teachers and learners with the tools that will allow their learning goals and objectives to be met. As such, it is the most stressful task, especially working with understudies. Managing them and looking after them during outdoor activity. On Wednesday, June 26, 2024, my friend and I were carrying out an outdoor education at Tebwanimwaneka compound. Our learning focus was “prevention of communicable diseases.” The number of children altogether that we teach was twenty-three. Notwithstanding, in this composition, it will zero in on the strengths and weaknesses we noticed during outdoor sessions.
As a matter of fact, prior to carrying out an outdoor education, we research first for the location to avoid risk and checking the weather forecast. As the weather seems calm, we instruct students to stand in two lines and march with them to an area where it is less hot and prevents heat (under a tree). We obviously expressed and stated the topic along with the learning outcomes or goal they ought to achieve at the end of the lesson. We were well prepared prior to teaching, as we could notice and feel from the way we educated students. We managed to introduce the lesson accordingly and lead in students into the topic through a warmer activity, which is racing. In addition, our teaching worked out in a good way from the beginning of our delivery until the end of it. Certain and confident while teaching, facilitating students when they need assistance, especially when doing their group activity.
Moreover, after doing an outdoor activity, we search again for a place that lessens the heat and distribute students to their groups to do their activity. We assess them to see whether they achieve the learning outcomes or not. They were participating in their group activities, working together with their peers by sharing critical thinking from what they already learned after doing an outdoor activity, while we walked around monitoring and facilitating them if they really needed help. It seems that they pretty much understand the topic and ways to prevent communicable diseases. In their presentation, they mentioned that, communicable diseases caused by dust, eating unbalanced food, returning from the toilet without washing hands, and the way to avoid and prevent it, is from eating balanced diets, having a bath, washing hands after playing with dust, and returning from the restroom.
Furthermore, we praise them for their participation and effort throughout an outdoor education by giving them positive reinforcements. Positive reinforcement assist them improve and empowere their learning progress for the future and likewise encouraged them to continue doing that behavior (participate in the learning process).
In addition, we could notice and feel some weakness during outdoor activity. Controlling is our weaknesses. We cannot control a large number of students. It was really hard, since certain students made it as their play time. Controlling outdoor education is tough, since nature cannot continuously know or expect ahead of time. It is like when things happen that you did not plan
for or cannot control, especially in outdoor activities where the weather or conditions might change suddenly. It is just like a surprising gift. In addition, being too strict could minimize fun and learning that comes from exploring and adapting to what nature throws at you. However, it is about searching for a balance between being prepared and going with the flow to make the most of outdoor learning experiences.
To conclude, in any event, teaching outdoor education is the most upsetting errand particularly working with youngsters, but we managed ourselves to confront all the consequences while we entered this field. In particularly, we set ourselves up, by doing our lesson plans, providing resources and to construct an easy task for students that align with the topic, to improve their understanding and engaged them, so they can fully participate in the learning and teaching process and that what they obviously did. However, most importantly, help students explore and give them opportunities to that relates to real life situation.