Active Playtime Challenge

 What is the Active Playtimes Challenge?

• Aims to improve playtimes across schools with the implementation of play resources and play knowledge training.
• The knowledge on how to facilitate more and improved time, space and permission for children’s play.
• The views and opinions of the whole school collected and considered
• Continued support and guidance for the duration of the project

Bronze, Silver & Gold

The active playtimes challenge spans across 3 stages and are all optional to each setting if they choose to progress to the next stage.

Bronze - Improve the understanding of play needs across the setting. Improve use of facilities, resources and resource storage.

Silver - Continued support for entire school. Opportunities to open up school grounds for community use outside of school hours. Training for wider school community. Bespoke support to challenge any barriers arising in play provision.

Gold - Community outreach to develop wider knowledge of play. Development of play champions council and assurance they are being heard across the council.

Training and Workshops for All

• Play training is made available for the whole school to take part in and a whole school approach is essential to the success of the project.

• The duration of the training is 6 hours and can be split into 2 sessions.

• The training explores the value of play, its strategic context, the role of play work, tools to support play, managing risk and putting theory into practice.

• A workshop will be run for the children focusing on there rights to play and is aimed at the school council.

Loose Parts, What are They?

Loose parts can be anything from materials to tubes, ropes to tyres. Loose parts create richer environments for children to play in, giving them the resources they need to extend their play.

Loose parts aren’t prescriptive. Instead they offer limitless possibilities, giving children more opportunities to change and handle the resources and more choice about how they do it.

So do they improve playtimes?

In short, YES.

Children have far more options at playtime with loose parts and more space and opportunity to fuel there imagination and creativity.
Feedback shows a reduction in behaviour related incidents due to the additional resources at playtimes.

And not only playtimes, feedback has shown an improvement in class time too.

For further information please contact leisure.development@conwy.gov.uk