**VIRTUAL NATURE SCHOOL** With many young children at home during the coronavirus crisis, parents could have access to a stress-free way of filling up each day with positivity, collaboration, engagement and learning. Virtual Nature School shares daily provocations and live interaction for children aged between 3 and 11 years old to ensure curriculum progression through differentiated teaching while connecting with their peers using video technology. The key benefit is that while the learning is delivered via a web based application, the material is designed to **minimise the amount of screen time** that children are exposed to. Most of the time will be spent on **inquiry-based learning** using their hands and getting creative both inside and outside the home. **Here is what a typical day of Virtual Nature School looks like:** 1. Enter the live virtual classroom at the start time to discuss the day's focus. 2. Get off the screen and work on the day's inquiry - it involves being active and designing/making something! 3. Come back to the virtual classroom after a few hours and share the group learning. 4. At the end of each day, families receive a video summary of the day's key learning and additional information on how to support their children further. 5. The same theme is explored all week to allow children to build on their learning each day. Virtual Nature School will engage children's learning through our own bespoke Inquiry Tracker App which will contain high quality, educational and engaging content. Our App will be fully mobile and interactive and, we expect, available though most online market providers. **Real-life example of a week at Virtual Nature School** During the first week of April, the focus was "STEM learning through marbles". Children collaborated to design and make marble runs and mazes. On each day, a new challenge was set to extend children's thinking and it was a pleasure to see their confidence and quality of work improve throughout the week. In advance of the week, parents were equipped with information on how they could best support their children, as well as the knowledge that throughout the time that their children were "playing" with marbles, they were actually learning important aspects of the curriculum including forces, density, mass, speed, measuring, angles and shapes. Some feedback from the parents at the end of the week included: _"...we've had a great first week and have thoroughly enjoyed the marble challenges set, the learning is first-rate, thank you."_ _"Thank you for a wonderful week. Nature school is the highlight of our day."_ _"It's been amazing to see how all three of my children are playing and learning together in our weekly projects!"_r

To develop a toolkit/training programme available as a publication that supports teachers and others interested in learning that takes place outside.