Our real play experiences.

Nature Play
Children have a strong natural affinity for other living beings – a concept called ‘Biophilia’. Through nature play they can contact and connect with plants and animals in a meaningful way, providing positive experiences and encouraging a sense of wonder about the wild world.

Playful Journeys
These encourage the natural flow of uninhibited play where children explore local geographies, often with others and over time. Through freely-chosen journeys they can discover playful invitations: barriers to cross, trails to follow, stepping stones, changing surfaces and varied terrain, whilst immersed in what they are doing.

Active Play
Children enjoy using their bodies in different ways and moving actively just for its own sake. Through play they seek to experience a wide range of whole-body movements such as: crawling, hanging, hopping, jumping, rolling, running, spinning, twisting, tumbling, sliding and swinging. Physical play promotes and develops children’s skills in agility, balance, flexibility, strength and endurance.

Adventure Play
Children seek out uncertainty through adventurous play. Negotiating unfamiliar experiences can be surprising, exciting and daring, providing risk-taking opportunities that meet their own interests and abilities. Here, children are allowed to experience and manage physical, mental and emotional challenges.

Imaginative Play
Through the course of their play, children can discover, invent and explore a myriad of different imaginary worlds. These can be fleeting fantasies, carefully constructed alternate realities or recreations of everyday roles and identities. The more varied and stimulating the physical play space, the more their imaginations can fly.

Unstructured Play
At best, children’s play should be freely chosen, personally directed and open-ended. Children naturally enjoy having a sense of freedom to explore, create and discover without adult-mediated rules or predetermined outcomes, allowing endless possibilities of play.

Constructive Play
Building and making is a natural expression of children’s outdoor play, allowing mastery and control over physical materials and spaces. It allows them to shape and adapt their own play places over time. Often it is accomplished through cooperation, yet also allows scope for unique and individual expression.

Play Refuges
When playing, children often seek out or create intimate and calm spaces where they feel safe or comfortable. Sometimes these are places where they can see out without being seen themselves, a concept called ‘Prospect-refuge’. Play refuges can be used to hide away from others or find some rest away from the flow.

Creative Play
Through play children design, create and express their own ideas, utilising a range of materials, methods and tools – where getting messy is part of the process! Children experiment with physical resources around them to make markings, structures and sculptures, bringing their vivid imaginations to life.

Exploratory Play
Play and learning often happen through hands-on exploration and experimentation with different objects, materials or spaces. Investigating and testing the things around them helps satisfy children’s natural curiosity and sense of wonder.

Sensory Play
Engaging with all the different senses through play allows children to increase their self-awareness and make sense of the world around them. In a diverse physical space, they can playfully interact with light, colours, sounds, smells, sensations and textures through their senses.

Social Play
Through play children can explore social dynamics and learn how to express their needs, as well as establish boundaries and resolve differences. They naturally use shared communication and collaborative engagement to interact with others, including both familiar friends and new social contacts.

Inter-Generational Play
Play, although the speciality of childhood, can be enjoyably shared across the generations. Sometimes this allows children to get a helping hand from more experienced adults, but often it can simply be to share the fun of the occasion. We all learn and develop from each other and these playful, inter-generational experiences can be some of our most memorable moments.

Small World Play
As well as interacting with life-size features and play spaces, children often enjoy creating and playing with their own miniature worlds. These small-scale creations allow the invention of new play constructs, such as fairy houses, insect villages and mini-playgrounds. The different perspective of small worlds allows children to take on roles of creators and rulers, playfully exploring the lives of the imagined inhabitants.