The benefits of structured play.

Structured and Unstructured play (free Play) are both vital to our children’s well being, learning and growth.

“Balance is key” -A healthy, balanced play diet will have an equal focus on helping a child develop logical and creative thinking skills.

When can I use Structured play in my classroom?

If you are looking to help children and students learn how to solve problems, work toward an individual or collective goal, or improve active listening then structured play activities are ideal for building these skills. This category of play is also useful for strengthening children’s confidence, encouraging resilience, and learning how to cooperate within a team and develop stronger communication skills.

What does structured Play look like in our classroom?

Structured Play Activities:

1-Brickwork. 

We use lego to help our children learn good social skills such as waiting, turn-taking, listening, sharing and importantly allowing others to create their own without getting upset.

We implemented brickworks into our programme twice a week on Wednesdays and Thursdays for 20 minutes.

The staff is working with a small group of children (2-3 students) if manageable and on a 1:1. The students are encouraged to work together to build a figure under the teacher's supervision and guidance. The teacher’s role is to model and reinforce the target skill where it is appropriate throughout the session.

Brick Work

2. “ENGAGE ME”-

We use ENGAGE games to teach our students a variety of skills. The game they are playing here is called “Object copy” The skills they have to learn is-’ to look carefully, remember the pattern and to make the pattern’.

We implemented this engage game into our weekly programme twice a week (Mondays and Tuesdays) for 20 minutes.

            OBJECT COPY

3. Physical Education-(Simple games)

This term, our students are learning to enjoy participating in a range of games and activities. Every 2 weeks we try to learn a new game such as ‘musical chairs’ and ‘hot potato’.

Every morning we start our day with quick fitness (15 minutes)

 and finish our day with a Yoga session before the students go home.

Our focus is to ensure that our students are going home happy. 

Yoga helps to reset them and ready to go home in a happy mood.

daily fitness	daily Yoga session
“musical chairs”	“hot Potato”

References-Structured play https://www.playgroundcentre.com/unstructured-vs-structured-play/