Jenny Deeble:
We introduced play-based approaches in 2018. We started very slowly. We did it more as a discovery time. We felt that the children developed conversations through discovery learning and them doing various play-based activities. Then it needed to have more structure around it and we started to look down the path of going down play-based learning and learning more about it. At the same time, we had become an accredited IB school and with part of the IB philosophy, they did change their approach. They brought in the enhanced model, which had a real focus on play-based learning. We felt this married really well with the way we were heading with inquiry learning, especially for foundation students who find the structure of a guided inquiry quite difficult.
We had a lot of parent interest in nature play because a lot of their children had been involved in Bush Kinders in the local community. As a school, we are an inner-city school. We do not have a lot of play areas, but we felt it was a great opportunity. We had an area at the back of our school that was underused, and we felt it was a great opportunity to convert it to a nature-play outdoor classroom. We did form a committee of teachers and parents who came together to work on the design, and we did get some children to give us what it would look like if you could have a perfect playground that had nature involved. We got many drawings and put them together and we had a display that all parents could come and have a look at and give us feedback. That gave us the basis of what we were looking for when we went to the designers about our play-based space.
It was not always easy. We did have to convince some people that we are developing a space that will have a certain degree of risk and getting children to be challenged in trying to do more climbing, in an era where we are more protective of children. It was really good to have the parent forum and have them interact and ask questions of what we were doing and how children would be supervised in that space.
As a school, we financed this project through our parents, a lot of fundraising over the last four years. They felt this was a project they really wanted to see come to fruition. Our fundraising efforts over the last four years have been towards nature play. We have been patient waiting until we have managed to get those funds available, and that is where we are at the moment. With our play-based program in our classrooms, of course, we are a deficit school. We do not have a huge amount of resources, so it is a lot of building as we go. We have started with just what we had in the school as resources. We scrounged around and found any available games and puzzles and pieces of Lego or whatever we had, and we started with really what was available. And over the years, we have just slowly introduced more and more elements to the program. But it still is very much a program based on using what is available. The teachers do really well to get things that are quite common that children can use to then use their creativity to create structures and different things through their play.
In the nature playground and outdoor classroom, there will be natural tools like log pieces and big stones and materials they can pick up and manoeuvre around as part of either a maths activity or a creation or a building activity. There will be a big shelter so that teachers can be outdoors no matter what the weather's like, and they will be able to have those lessons outside. But also, the adventure structure is made totally of logs and a net and climbing frames. It is not your traditional playground. It has more of that natural feel. And I think the beauty of this one is, it will have a net that sits quite high up and it will be amongst the trees and children actually feel like they are in a tree environment. I think that is quite unique.
[End of transcript]
Updated