OPAL Play
Our vision is that every child in every school has an amazing hour of high quality play every day – with no exceptions. If one child is not enjoying playtimes, then things still need improving.
At Amington Heath, we are committed to ensuring quality play opportunities are available to all our children. We believe that play is essential for physical, emotional, social, spiritual and intellectual development of each child. Most of our best childhood memories are from playing outdoors, climbing trees and exploring the wide world around us. OPAL gives us the opportunity to give those memories to your children. OPAL (Outdoor Play and Learning) is all about using naturally and man made resources to allow children to be inspired and creative at playtime.
Children spend 20% of their time at school playing. With this in mind we are engaging with the OPAL Primary Programme (Outdoor Play and Learning) to support us in promoting freedom for children to explore play in their own imaginative ways, using found and gathered resources in the natural outdoor environment.
We are at the beginning of our OPAL journey and have successfully introduced the first phase to children.
Thank you for your support with:
- Donating to school small world creatures, cars, pots and pans etc. for the creative play
- Sending your child into school with appropriate warm/waterproof clothing and wellies
- Supporting the OPAL ethos by asking your child about their play and accepting that they may get dirty.
You can still help us more by donating any unwanted materials you have at home such as:
- Plastic or metal buckets
- Kitchen utensils, pots, pans, baking trays, sieves, colanders etc for the mud kitchen
- Watering cans, wheel barrows, guttering
- Large pieces for fabric
- Toy trucks, diggers, cars
- Small world creatures e.g. dinosaurs, farm animals etc.
- Car tyres
We are at the very start of out OPAL journey. This video was made just 7 weeks into the project. Look how much pplay is happening and how the children are mixing across all age groups.
