OPAL
OPAL at Riverside Primary School
OPAL Play Policy 2024-25
Wheelie Wednesday
The children enjoy bringing their bikes and scooters to school every Wednesday. A section of the yard is dedicated to Wheelie Wednesday each week. Children understand the importance of wearing a helmet.
Wellies & Waterproofs
School fund has enabled us to purchase wellies and other waterproof clothing for the children to wear at Break and Lunch. This means the children can still go on the grass and splash in the puddles on rainy days.
Skipping
The children enjoy skipping with the big skipping ropes. Counting how many jumps they can complete as well as learning to run in and out.
Woodland Areas
We have enjoyed building our own dens in the woodland area at the back of the school yard. We have used old materials to build shelters as well as using tyres to build swings.
Co-operative Play
School fund has also bought new toys for the children to play with.
Toys include:
- Diggers
- Blocks
- Construction
- Lego
- Duplo
- Small world
- Dinosaurs
- Animals
Our OPAL journey
We would like to tell you about an exciting initiative taking place in our school. This has helped us to improve the quality of play for all of our children. We are working closely with an organisation called OPAL (Outdoor Play and Learning) and are looking at how we can provide a range of challenging and fun opportunities at playtime.
Ethos:
Play has changed significantly over the last 25 years as the world has become a much busier and more technologically developed place. Children, sadly, sometimes miss out on the physical and creative side of play that is so important to their development. OPAL has been designed to give children the sense of freedom that perhaps we all enjoyed as children but that the modern world sometimes denies us.
We are committed to ensuring quality play opportunities are available to all of our children at Riverside Primary School as we believe that play is essential for children’s physical, emotional, social and intellectual development.
Our vision for play at Riverside Primary School:
Play in our school is a freely chosen activity which children find satisfying and enjoyable. It provides them with an opportunity to use their intuition, be physically active, be creative, make their own decisions, be outdoors and overall have fun.
The OPAL Programme rationale is that: “More active and creative playtimes can mean happier and healthier children, and having happier, healthier, more active children usually results in a more positive attitude to learning in school, with more effective classroom lessons, less staff time spent resolving unnecessary behavioural problems, fewer playtime accidents, happier staff and a healthier attitude to life”.