How to film your day outdoors

Children are tricky animals to film! They are fast moving, noisy and unpredictable, especially when they’re in the middle of their Outdoor Classroom Day activities. Capturing your Outdoor Classroom Day on film is a great way to celebrate what you did and demonstrate the impact getting outdoors has on children.

To help you make an amazing film, we’ve worked with filmmaker David Bond to produce this ‘How to film your day outdoors’ video. In it, David shares ten of his top tips to help you capture those special moments throughout your day.

As well as being a wonderful keepsake for you and your students, you could use your film to:

• Share your experiences with colleagues.
• Inspire other teachers to get outdoors.
• Show parents how your school is making sure their children experience the many befits of outdoor learning and play.
• Demonstrate impact to head teachers and other decision-makers and make the case for outdoor learning and play every day.

 

You can download the top ten tips to film your Outdoor Classroom Day and take it with you when you go outdoors!

Example questions to ask children:

1. How much fun are you having, from one to ten?
2. What’s the best thing about Outdoor Classroom Day?
3. How does being outdoors make you feel?
4. What are your favourite outdoor games?
5. This just looks like fun, are you actually learning anything?
6. What’s going on here?
7. Do you like getting muddy?
8. What else would you like to do?
9. Do you want to have Outdoor Classroom Day again? When? Why?
10. If you had more time to play every day what would that be like?

Remember to share your film on social media to inspire others using the #OurDayOutdoors hashtag.

BE PART OF THE BIGGER PICTURE

Your film could also be featured in our crowd-sourced campaign film that will help us reach more teachers around the world, get more supporters involved, and get more children outdoors.

This brilliant film will be shot by you, the people on the ground, and be edited by David. The film will show how Outdoor Classroom Day is celebrated around the world and why outdoor play and learning should be part of every day.

If you would like to be part of this global project, please submit your footage using one of the following methods:

1. Send us an email to info@outdoorclassroomday.com for files smaller than 10MB.
2. Use Wetransfer to transfer one or more files that are up to 2GB.
3. Upload on your Youtube or Vimeo channel and send us the link. Please be sure to set the link to be freely downloadable.

 

The best footage will be used in the final film.

Edit your footage

How video-editing savvy are you? If you know how to edit videos, you can use iMovie or a similar editing tool to stitch different takes together. Export the result using as high resolution as possible. If not, don’t worry!  Take multiple clips of your day and send them to us separately.

Permission forms

As you will know, we need permission from parents and guardians to share films of children.

You will probably have your own photography policy in place at your school. If you do, please send us a copy of this policy together with this completed teacher consent form when you submit your film.

If you don’t already have permissions in place, here is a template letter and consent form you can use to send to parents of the children participating before your Outdoor Classroom Day activity. Once you have received permission from parents or guardians, please download and send us this teacher consent form when submitting your footage.

Now get outdoors and capture your adventures!