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How to Get Adult Led Play Right
Adult led play is a key tactic to ensure playtime aids in children’s development by aligning activities with age-appropriate developmental goals. By providing the right equipment and structuring play activities around core learning principles, teachers can help make playtime not only fun, but beneficial for long-term learning, wellbeing, and health.
By initiating play with a prompt or suggestion, teachers are able to breaks into the ideal time for holistic development. But where do you start to get the full benefits of adult led play? Let us help with our latest guide for teachers looking to add a little something extra to playtime!
Building Safe, Customisable Active Play Trails
Setting out a challenging trim trail path with age-appropriate obstacles gives teachers control over the level of risk that students face, while giving them the space to challenge and push themselves as they want. We recommend movable free standing trim trails, especially for younger children. This is because teachers can rearrange and add new components to constantly keep the trail fresh and introduce greater challenges as children grow.
Bringing active challenges into play is a great way to engage and excite children and get them moving. Our free standing trim trail elements allow teachers to arrange obstacle courses that match the abilities of children from nursery into key stage one. Adult led play in early education is important when undertaking active play in part because it ensures a level of supervision that prevents students from taking on too big a challenge.
Adult Led Play Meets Environmental Learning
Sending students out on a bug hunt with a worksheet on local insects and where they may find them helps them along with their adventure towards discovery. Bringing a variety of insect species to the bug inspection table gives children a wider breadth of understanding of their local ecosystems. Also, with further lessons from their teacher, they can also more deeply appreciate the anatomy of bugs and learn to identify them by themselves.
Sometimes, adult led play is equated with controlling and limiting children’s fun, but in certain environments, adults are needed to give children a nudge towards new discoveries. Bug hotels and inspection tables enable children to study and discover new worlds, but require guidance from teachers to create a fully beneficial and safe experience.
Shaping Creativity with Mark-Making
Outdoor classrooms can also incorporate mark making panels for a unique and memorable lesson. Visual learning is a core part of early development, and drawing on the whiteboard, or even just writing with a variety of different colours can help children to focus on and remember lesson content more effectively.
While mark making is a fun independent activity, bringing a little leadership into an art session helps expand imaginations and inspire a wider variety of storytelling and fun. Adult initiated play with mark-making and art supplies is all about prompting children to creatively interpret a story, situation, or concept they learnt in school. This allows children to reprocess in-class information in a different environment and through different methods, enhancing understanding and the process of memorization.
Guiding Roleplay with Real-World Context
For example, in a shop-keeping roleplay experience, the transaction experience may be unfamiliar to young children. By directing students to play out paying for items and receiving change, teachers add knowledge and context to the roleplay that opens up a wider variety of stories that children can tell (while also sneaking in a little maths practice without them noticing!).
Roleplay is a natural extension of play because children’s imaginations are endless! However, some roleplay scenarios require a bit more context for children to appreciate them. With adults involved in roleplay scenarios, students can ask questions about experiences they are unfamiliar with and incorporate what they learn into their play.
Direct Your Students' Acting Activities
Children, especially younger children, may need support to begin truly expressing themselves. By providing a stage backdrop, props, and costumes, as well as story suggestions or scripts, teachers can help children come out of their shells and express their inner actor!
On the stage, children are free to act, sing, and dance, but sometimes, they need a director to keep them on track! A playground stage space is an incredibly versatile and useful piece of equipment, and performing freely helps develop children’s independence. However, a performance space can become chaotic without some guidance.
Get the Most Out Of Adult Led Play with the Right Equipment
Check out our wide range of playground equipment for both independent free play and adult led play. From climbing frames and gazebos to sandpits and puzzle panels, we have what your playground needs!
Get in touch with our team for a quote with the handy form on our contact page.