For our Geography focus on Mapping Skills, Year 4 enjoyed an amazing day out at the Stockswood Outdoor Centre. 

We enjoyed singing some campfire songs to get us in the mood for a fun outing! Everyone was very enthusiastic. This helped us recap forest safety rules and fire safety rules, which we put into practice throughout the day.

We learnt how to spot symbols on our map and the importance of using a key, or legend, to help us decipher what the symbols were on a map. When we realised our key was not labelled, we went out into Stockswood to discover what each symbol meant by orientating ourselves North and following the map to prevent us from getting lost. We had some amazing teamwork for this activity!

We then learnt about the eight directions. We focused first on North, East, South and West, then explored North East, South West, South East and North East. We used these directions to orientate ourselves and track our grid references.

We worked really hard using four-figure grid references to find our goals. In pairs, we were given a reference and had to find the square on our map's grid, then go and find what was in that square using our knowledge of symbols and our directional skills to spot the real-life thing that each grid reference was asking us to find. There was some inspirational teamwork here from Year 4!

To finish off a wonderful day full of valuable learning, we toasted some marshmallows over the fire!