Creating connections through play: your activities

We play every day; it’s what we do – but during the week, we focused on water. The children have discovered how it flows and have transported in containers. They have learned about teamwork to make water channels. We mixed water with cornflour paint and shaving foam Nothing out of the ordinary but even the grownups got stuck in too. We were certainly helped by the glorious weather.

We run 11 Community Toy Library sessions across the City every week. During the week, we enjoyed water play amongst lots of other games and activities.

We also held a Toy Library picnic and invited families to join us for a day of fun and games. There were lots of toys, play experiences and a chance to meet other service providers in the City.

As this year’s theme for the National Week of Play was all around connections, we planned lots of fun, engaging activities and games to encourage collaboration and communication between the children. In our Montessori setting, children of different ages are mixed and play together and the older children particularly enjoy helping the younger ones with tasks and happily giving them directions during play. For example, we played a memory game where children had to guess which object had disappeared from under the blanket. We sat in a circle and chose a range of interesting items that sparked children’s curiosity. We hid the items, such as Russian dolls and wooden small world figures (including those with physical disabilities) under the blanket and this sparked conversations between the children about different themes and topics.

They chatted about places they’ve visited on holiday, languages they can speak and differences between themselves and others. This was just one of the many play-based activities that we were inspired to plan throughout the National Week of Play 2023.

Our connection was intergenerational. Ladywell Pre-school is historically connected with the Alexander Care Home, which is situated opposite the pre-school.

Before the pandemic, we used to take a group of children to visit the elderly residents of the home. After the pandemic, this year, we have started up our visits again. The children sing and engage with some of the residents in different activities, such as making bracelets. The joy of the residents is visible on their faces as they interacted with the children. The children also greatly benefit from the visits, learning to relate to a much older generation and communicating with them through play.

The pre-school staff also connected with the children by sharing and teaching them the games we used to play when we were children ourselves. These included hula hooping, hopscotch, hide and seek, paper boats, rolling tyres with two sticks and jumping across an elastic band that two children attach around their ankles.

For Play Week, our setting did ‘Messy Play Week’. Our week included:

• Making a train out of used boxes
  
• Marble painting
• Rolling a ball through paint to see what patterns we could make
• Shaving foam creations
• Painting flowers

We made social media campaigns about the importance of playful teachers connecting with both the children and their parents. We had a special feature on the power of block play for open-ended fun and connection.

We explored what our teachers think about their role in play and we introduced early pickups where the final half hour of the day is devoted to relaxed playful interactions with the staff and families.