Exciting playtimes coming soon
We would like to tell you about an exciting new opportunity that our school is about to embark on which will help us to improve the quality of play for all of our children.
Working with an organisation called OPAL (Outdoor play and learning), we are beginning to look at how best we can provide a range of challenging and fun opportunities at
playtime.
Play has changed hugely over the last 25 years as the world has become a much busier and more technologically developed place. Children sadly sometimes miss out on the physical, creative side of play that is so important to their development. OPAL has been designed to give children the sense of freedom that perhaps we all enjoyed as children but that the modern world sometimes denies us.
We are committed to ensuring quality play opportunities are available to all of our children at Kirkleatham as we believe that play is essential for children’s physical,
emotional, social and intellectual development.
Our vision for play at Kirkleatham:
We would like play in our school to become a freely chosen activity which your child will find satisfying and enjoyable. It will provide them with an opportunity to use their intuition, be physically active, be creative, make their own decisions, be outdoors and overall have fun.
So what does this all mean?
How we play during lunch times will change over the next 12 months or so. Children will be offered new challenges and allowed to play with a range of new equipment and resources. Children will be allowed access to different parts of the school such as the field if they have suitable footwear. Children will be allowed to play outdoors in most weathers and you may find your child maybe a little dirtier when they arrive home. The new ways to play will be introduced slowly and we will of course work closely with all children on developing their resilience and risk assessment skills.
Our school will have a play policy and long term plan to develop play and our school lunch time staff will be trained and positively motivated to support play. We feel this is an exciting time at Kirkleatham and do hope you will support our changes and efforts to improve the quality of play for everyone.
Want to know what playtime might look like? Click on the video below to see a fantastic example of a platinum OPAL school.