Taking pupils out of the classroom opens up a whole range of activities for teaching young children about the natural world.

The Stone Age might not have been a fun time to live in for our ancestors, but finding out about it can be an enjoyable and educational experience for younger children.

Every year, for a week in spring or summer, two classes of mixed-aged pupils (ages 6-11), 20 to 30 children in all, swap the classroom for a nearby meadow to learn in the open air. Initially, my colleague and I ran the project alone; in the past few years, we have had the help of a trainee teacher and a university student. We also have the support of a local farmer, who lends us the meadow and gives us access to his fields, and a local scout group who provide us with a yurt in case it rains. With these simple facilities, we spend our days learning about nature, focusing on a different theme each year. In 2010, we investigated life in the Stone Age.

A meadow with nearby trees and a stream is ideal, because it can be used to teach a range of topics including plants, insects, nutrition and even building simple structures. However, the concept is flexible enough to be adapted to a range of locations and subjects – in previous years, we have used the themes of pirates, knights and ladies, the Middle Ages, horses, farm animals, ships, flight and the Olympic games. And if you don’t have access to a meadow, you could perhaps use a local park.

The project begins a week before we head to the meadow, with a box of books about our chosen theme: in this case, the Stone Age. As a class, we talk about different aspects of our chosen topic: for example, about the landscape, the wildlife that roamed over it and how humans lived at the time – hunting animals, gathering plants, living arrangements, family life, tools and so on. Keen children can do some extra reading in their free time.

The children dug a latrine and then built a screen around it. Gathering materials and building a screen turned into an interesting activity in its own right. The children had to think about design requirements – such as withstanding moderate wind and rain, and hiding the user from sight. Such activities are an opportunity to learn about basic science and technology through trial and error.

Our pupils first tried building a tent-like structure, but that proved too small to get into. A second, more successful attempt taught them that using long, thick sticks, they could build a bigger and more solid structure, but that for privacy, the gaps needed to be filled with smaller things like grass, moss and leaves.

For example, in our Stone Age project, one group activity involved learning about hunting. The hunters’ group – which was popular with girls as well as boys – made bows and arrows out of branches and string^w1, and learned how to use them. Having a small forest nearby to gather sticks and branches from was a big help, but of course it would also be possible to provide the raw materials from elsewhere if necessary.

This activity offers considerable opportunity for experimentation and problem solving^w2. Which kind of wood works best? How thick? How dry? And how best to shoot the arrows? Is it better to fire upwind or downwind? Should you aim horizontally or upwards? Do feathers make the arrow fly straighter? The pupils spontaneously asked many of these questions themselves, but teachers can also help to structure the exercise by making suggestions and pointing the children in the right direction.

Of course, the companion to hunting is gathering. We have tried a range of gathering activities in several of our weeks on the meadow, as a way to learn more about plants and food. For example, one group collected herbs, such as chamomile, mint and lemon balm for infusions. A lot of children were not familiar with these, so we held a tasting session and smelled the plants before and after steeping in hot water^w2.

Another group gathered edible leaves such as dandelions to make a salad, which the class ate together. A third group gathered wheat grains from the farmer’s fields, ground them into flour and made flatbreads^w3, testing different cooking methods, including over an open fire and on hot stones.

As well as contributing to the bread-making activity, building a fire is a way of learning about which materials burn well, and how to avoid damaging the landscape by using local material like sand, earth and water from the stream to tidy up afterwards. It also plays a role in the final stage of our week on the meadow: inviting the parents to see what their children have learned.

We also take specific precautions depending on the activities. For example, it is vital to correctly identify edible plants^w4, be aware of any local parasites or other health hazards, and not to allow the children to eat anything without the permission of a teacher. Similarly, activities involving fires or bows and arrows must be closely supervised.

The precise activities you choose for your project will depend on your theme and on the site you use. We have always strived, however, to include hands-on activities. For instance, the year that our theme was horses, we had a real horse that the children could ride and groom, we made horses out of wood and created jewellery for the horse’s mane, to name just a few activities. When we used the theme of pirates, the children made paper boats and raced them on the stream, learned how to sword fight, played games that involved boarding other ships, and made pirate clothes and eye patches.

Whatever the current year’s theme, on the last day, we set up exhibitions of what the different groups have been doing. For example, parents get to see the bows and arrows, and the children explain how they are made and used. The class presents the different types of fuel that they have experimented with in the fire, and demonstrate which ones burn better or less well. The gatherers invite the parents to try the different types of herbs and plants they have collected throughout the week.

The central part of the final day is cooking up a big pot of soup out of freshly picked vegetables and plants from the meadow and the fields – another opportunity to learn about plants, but also a more general introduction to healthy eating, and a shared experience for children, parents and teachers. For most of our pupils, many of whom come from disadvantaged backgrounds, this is the first time they have tried soup prepared from fresh ingredients. Over the years, we have seen that pupils take the idea of freshly prepared food back home with them – a perfect example of how practical and theoretical elements come together.