Farming World as an Outdoor Classroom
A Guide for Teachers
A complete understanding of the countryside, and the many activities associated with it, is impossible within four walls of a classroom.
It follows that teachers and children need outdoor classrooms which provide practical opportunities and first hand experience of all aspects of the National Curriculum. For the teacher, it provides an opportunity to sense new experiences and to put into practice skills acquired in the classroom.
A visit to Farming World gives teachers and school children a unique opportunity to experience for themselves the realities of modern farming, thus making Farming World educationally valuable as an excellent shop window for the farming industry.
We have introduced a maths trail and activity sheets relating to a whole host of practical maths opportunities found upon the farm. The activities have been chosen to support learning from the earliest Mathematical Development Stepping Stones for the Foundation Stage up to Key Stage 2 learning.
At Key Stage 3 it is rare for food, farming and the countryside to feature explicitly in work schemes, but teachers do have the freedom to develop their own schemes(as long as they meet the requirements of the National Curriculum) and the scope to build in food, farming and countryside topics.
At Key Stage 4 we realise that teachers will have to be specific about the content of a farm visit. In some cases it may be part of the coursework component and we can arrange for you to carry out independent fieldwork and investigations on our farm.
Farming World is part of a family run agricultural business which farms over 1500ha, covering a wide range of crops, arable, cereals, hops, fruit, and leisure. Farming World therefore has all the facilities required for a school visit, and it can explore relationships between physical features and land use.
Join visits with other business in the area can be arranged so that comparisons can be made. A split visit with Shepherd Neame brewery in Faversham can be beneficial when studying the process as a whole, and noting the environmental and political issues.
For more information please see the key stages PDF's below.
Key Stage 1 | Key Stage 2 | Key Stage 3 | Key Stage 4
A female pig is called a sow, and a male is a boar
Pigs cannot sweat - They love to wallow in the mud to keep cool, and use the mud as sun-tan lotion to stop getting sunburnt
Pigs have an excellent sense of smell, they can sniff out truffles as much as 30cm underground
A Pig is very lazy it sleeps for an average of 13 hours per day