A keen personal interest in natural history, involvement in environmental organisations, and experience, first as a secondary biology teacher and later as a field teacher, means that this author has spent many years working outdoors. Any part of the curriculum involving ecological concepts would lead her to open the door and go outside. She started work on a project to encourage primary teachers to take part in a fieldwork activity in their local environments. It was only then, that she and her colleague discovered that there were deep-rooted reasons why many primary teachers did not follow them outside. Some of the reasons noted were predictable--cost, health, safety, and lack of time. More unexpected was their lack of confidence in their knowledge of the outdoor environment and of actually working outside. In spite of this reluctance, when asked about the value of fieldwork and children going outside the classroom to learn, all the teachers said that there should be more of it, even listing some benefits for the children, including making them aware of the science that is in the world around them. This article describes a project involving fieldwork activities with year 5 and 6 children (ages 9-11). The activity required the children to find and identify particular species within the school grounds. The children went on to produce high-quality information pages on their chosen species, using their ICT skills. They imported photographs they had taken and wrote their own descriptions from their observations. These were collated to produce a field guide that could be used by their peers and was a credit to the children, who showed great pride in their work and the end product. The task let the children be the experts; after all, they were studying their school field and local environment. This gave them a sense of ownership of this often underutilised, yet versatile, educational resource--the school grounds.