BLOGS
HOW TO BRING THE 7 AREAS OF LEARNING FOR EYFS TO YOUR PLAYGROUND
Teachers are equipped to teach these key skills in the classroom, but what about time spent on the playground during breaks? For the best quality play provision for their developing minds, your playground equipment needs to include the 7 areas of learning for EYFS.
Independent learning of these skills through real experience is invaluable for childhood development and overall health. Early years playgrounds need to match and cater to the learning and development of early years students. With the provision of key play equipment, you can transform your EYFS playground into the ideal space for all-round early years outdoors learning.
COMMUNICATION AND LANGUAGE
For early years learners, play is crucial to developing social and communicative skills. Imaginative play puts the power in your students’ hands to express their inner worlds with peers at their own pace. Imagination is an element of creative play that helps build an understanding of the world and develop empathetic communication skills. As a structured class activity or an unstructured independent playground, ideas for primary school children at break time.
Roleplay scenarios with imaginative backdrops help children practice their communication by coming up with fun adventures or simply enacting things from their lives. With our range of roleplay backdrops, schools can set up a whole roleplay town, giving students the freedom to choose their character and interact organically. These roleplay backdrops and other equipment that harness imagination aim to inspire imagination and provide a backdrop for storytelling that children love.
EXPRESSIVE ARTS AND DESIGN
Creativity can reach its full potential on the playground. By providing space for a wider variety of artistic mediums and expression for children to choose and explore, your playground can become a space where children feel safe to express themselves however they wish.
Creative play, by definition, involves experiencing fun and art together. Schools can encourage creative play through a variety of methods. The best is to provide the right equipment and settings for creativity that they can use in self-directed play. This helps develop social skills as well as independence, self-expression, and self-knowledge.
Giant free-standing chalkboards and whiteboards give children space to draw and write with friends in a variety of ways. Designing their own worlds and characters improves socialisation and imagination, while playing games like hangman or noughts and crosses develops problem-solving skills. All while helping students practice their fine motor skills.
LITERACY
Word recognition, simple spelling and phonics rules, and alphabet learning are crucial elements of early education. By practicing basic literacy skills outside of the classroom, children become immersed in learning. EYFS outdoor education includes letter learning, spelling of basic words, and phonics practice.
Making this fun can be a difficult task, but by incorporating fun and tactile learning challenges, children can enjoy and even gravitate towards learning as a favourite form of play. Our literacy play equipment is specialised to provide support for classroom learning by reinforcing key literacy learning.
Literacy play panels and alphabet play markings can bring a pop of colour and fun to a playground while promoting reading. Teachers can incorporate them into outdoor EYFS lessons by offering students a spelling or phonics challenge to complete words or stories using the literacy equipment in their environment.
MATHEMATICS
Similarly to literacy learning, surrounding children with numbers and sums gives them the opportunity to familiarise themselves with key maths skills through play. Developing an educational atmosphere outside the typical classroom gets kids excited for learning, with maths panels and number line play markings.
Incorporating maths learning into the playground brings a new perspective to students. Reframing maths problems as fun, interactive games can help encourage students with a more tactile learning style to engage and understand maths to a greater extent. Maths play panels help students practice solving problems in a highly visual, tactile way, especially with our abacus moving panels.
Many common playground games involve numbers, like hopscotch, and snakes-and-ladders. These traditional games bring fun and physical activity to the playground while teaching key number skills like addition and subtraction. Colourful playground markings draw the eye towards the games where kids can play and practice their maths in their own time.
PERSONAL, SOCIAL, AND EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Social time outdoors is an important element to early years learning that often goes amiss. Offering a holistic environment that offers something for all areas of development allows children to work and play together, no matter their interests or play style.
Personal, social, and emotional development comes through the integration with safe challenges in puzzles or activities, with areas of reflection, creativity, and imagination. Play design is key to allowing for full development of this kind. Socialisation on the playground should not be restricted by the excitement of play, but also not separate from it. Therefore, we recommend outdoor classrooms for young children to rest, talk, read, and relax.
As well as offering large wooden gazebos and playhouses for primary schools, we also have a specialised shelter for early years playgrounds in our Hobbit House Dens. These small semi-circular dens are the ideal space for friends to sit and talk or read together while still experiencing the freedom and fun of the outdoors.
PHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT
By engaging in active play, all areas of children’s development and education benefit! Burning off energy, getting fresh air, and developing gross motor skills are important in improving focus during lessons and staying healthy.
EYFS outdoor active play requires specialised EYFS play equipment. To improve balance and spatial awareness, as well as encourage confidence building and risk assessment skills, equipment with multiple levels and activity types is required. The best equipment to achieve this is a trim trail.
Our trim trails and climbing frames come in variations suitable for EYFS play. Lower to the ground with less complex challenges, the Charnwood Trail Frame and Mini or Free-Standing Trim Trail options are ideal for younger children. Additionally, the Midi Hex Climber agility sticks variation has specialised safety ropes and balancing logs. You can even complete the play experience with a mini slide to dismount the climber.
UNDERSTANDING THE WORLD
Outdoor play often does what formalised classroom teaching cannot. In particular, experience out on the playground helps children understand more of the world and their surroundings. This is because of the more varied experiences and sensations they experience outdoors, of which nature is a huge part.
Inviting children to learn about the natural world with hands-on activities teaches them about compassion, life cycles, and caring for our environment. With an insect hotel or bug observation table, paired with informational posters on the development and maintenance of ecosystems, children can see and explore whole new worlds right under their noses.
Long-term projects, like growing a school garden, are also incredibly important in shaping young children’s understanding of responsibility, collaboration, and delayed gratification. Nursery or reception students can get involved with growing vegetables, herbs, and flowers with different-sized wooden planters. Bringing nature into your students’ hands for them to appreciate and nurture is a unique aspect of development that is just as important as any other form of learning.
DOES YOUR PLAYGROUND PROVIDE FOR THESE 7 AREAS OF LEARNING FOR EYFS STUDENTS?
If your EYFS play provision is lacking in one or more of these areas, get in touch with our team to see how we can fill in the gaps for a truly well-rounded play and learning experience. Or, you can browse our supply-only products now on our online storefront.