Frosty Footsteps: Sensory Outdoor Activities for Winter Learning

With The Outdoor Classroom app, teachers can turn these moments into purposeful learning through winter-themed digital courses that bring together sensory exploration, science enquiry, and early literacy skills. Perfect for EYFS and KS1, these activities link directly to science topics on weather, habitats, and living things.

Why Winter is a Sensory Goldmine

The winter environment offers experiences children simply can’t get in a classroom:

• The crunch of frosted leaves underfoot.
• The sparkle of ice on the playground fence.
• The silence of a misty morning, broken by birdsong.

These sensory details help young learners build vocabulary and descriptive language—key parts of early literacy development. At the same time, noticing seasonal change and animal behaviour feeds directly into EYFS Understanding the World and KS1 science objectives on weather patterns, habitats, and seasonal change.

The Royal Meteorological Society offers brilliant resources for weather learning, while RSPB’s Wild Challenge provides seasonal activities linked to wildlife and habitats—both ideal companions to your winter outdoor lessons.

Frosty Outdoor Activities to Try

• Sound Hunts – Take children outside to listen carefully: the crunch of footsteps, the drip of melting frost, the caw of winter birds. Pupils can record sounds as words, drawings, or digitally in the app.
• Ice Investigations – Collect icy leaves, puddles, or frosted grass. Pupils can observe changes as ice melts, linking to scientific enquiry about states of matter.
• Animal Clues – Search for bird tracks or signs of hibernation. Use prompts in the app to ask questions like “Where do you think the animals go in winter?”.
• Seasonal Senses Trail – Create a digital course with stations for touch (cold bark), sight (frost sparkle), smell (damp earth), and sound (rustling leaves). Pupils record their findings as they move around.
• Weather Watchers – Use simple equipment like rain gauges or thermometers to collect daily data, building graphs and spotting patterns over December.

For more seasonal inspiration, Muddy Faces has a fantastic bank of winter outdoor activity ideas.

How The Outdoor Classroom Supports Winter Learning

Winter can be challenging for teachers to plan for—but our app makes it simple to take advantage of the season:

• Set up winter-themed digital courses with sensory prompts, tailored to EYFS and KS1 science topics.
• Capture pupil responses instantly, giving teachers evidence for formative assessment in literacy and science.
• Encourage movement and exploration outdoors, even on frosty mornings.
• Build ongoing portfolios of pupil observations across the seasons, showing progression over time.

By blending sensory exploration with structured digital tools, The Outdoor Classroom turns a frosty playground into an active, curriculum-linked learning space.

Step Outside This December

Rather than avoiding the cold, let’s embrace it. Frost, ice, and winter wildlife aren’t barriers—they’re invitations to explore, notice, and wonder. With The Outdoor Classroom app, every frosty footprint becomes a step towards curiosity, confidence, and curriculum learning.

Sign up for free today and discover how our winter-themed activities can help your school bring science and literacy to life this season.

Let’s make December a month of frosty adventures and unforgettable outdoor learning.