OPAL (Outdoor Play and Learning) at St. Aidan’s has really began to develop over the last few months in school. Even though we have a proportion of our yard closed off, we have proactively developed the current areas we have in school and created a wonderful environment for our children to play in over break times. Even in its early stages, this project has required some big changes, all of which aimed to support and develop our children’s ability to play and socialise with their peers. Coming out of a number of challenging years after covid, we have aimed to facilitate more aspects of our children’s socio-communicative needs through making best use of unstructured time over the lunch period. Children now have more time to play with peers, have a number of self-directed activities they can engage in and are much more occupied in their outdoor learning than before. Although we are still changing and growing this project, we really would love any more donations, so please check out the notice board near the year 5/6 leavers gate as you enter school for an idea of the items we are after. We hope to support the 18 play behaviours that children need exposure to across their day to day lives.
