Street Play
What Is Street Play?
Street Play will be about children having equal access to and involvement in play. This includes all children whatever their ability, ethnic background, age, gender and disability. The Street Play Project will operate a mobile ‘Street Play’ van with 3 staff employed to deliver play citywide within communities on the streets and in local parks and open spaces, with particular emphasis on areas and groups with the poorest access to good play opportunities.
Key Project Aims
- Deliver a quality, exciting and creative programme of activities in communities targeting hotspots where there is growing concern that children are increasingly isolated, inactive and disinclined to exercise.
- Provide activities that are open and accessible to all taking positive steps in removing disabling barriers (both physical and social).
- To make children and young people a focus of the project and enable them to make decisions on their play experiences and form the street play offer.
- To provide an inclusive service that children will have fun, stay safe, be inspired, make friends, learn, contribute to and provide them with life skills socially and individually.
Benefits Of The Street Play Project
By developing a range of high quality play opportunities; the ultimate beneficiaries will be the children and young people. Children will be the focus of street play, giving them the opportunity and choice to influence and form the activities that are provided giving them the necessary platform and environment to play. We want to create an environment that will encourage children to develop their social, physical and emotional skills whilst learning to be co-operative, feel good about themselves, to achieve, imagine and dream. We also believe that Street Play may contribute to other aspects of children lives such as:
- Reduction in truancy.
- Increased school performance/behaviour.
- Decrease in anti-social behaviour in communities.
- Better skills in making friends and being cooperative.
- Teach children to use their time productively and in new ways.
- Support Children through difficult times during their lives.
- Increase in general health and well-being.
Play Opportunities To Be Provided
The Street Play Unit will be able to provide a broad variety of play opportunities that will cater for children’s needs and emotions. These play types are as follows:
- Rough and Tumble Play – Discovering physical flexibility, movement, falling, rolling etc. displaying and finding new movement.
- Creative Play – Developing a new response, allowing children the freedom to invent and explore new connections with an element of surprise.
- Fantasy Play – Discovering a new world in the child’s way, which is outside the realms of possibility.
- Communication Play – Using words, gestures, rhymes, poems, jokes, singing, acting and mime to play.
- Recapitulative Play – Play that allows a child to explore and access earlier human evolutionary stages such as fire darkness, history etc.
- Active Play – Movement in all directions for the sake of movement or to achieve a particular goal i.e. running to a lamppost.
- Mastery Play – Control of the physical and affective ingredients of the environment
Activities Will Include:
- Adventure Play Structures - mobile A-frames, swings, cargo nets - all that kids build
- Projects - making, building, designing, working in groups
- Themed Activities - Pirates, Kings and Queens, Wizards and Witches
- Junk Yard Olympics - Tyre flipping, building, improvised games, making sports equipment
- Environmental Activity - Climbing, digging, swings, rain/sun dancing, making dens
- Soft Play - Tumbling, falling, lounging
- Drama and Music - Dressing up, performing, singing, acting
- Quiet/chill out time
The Street Play Project hopes to have a huge impact on Play in Sheffield and be able to set-up a regular club so that the street play provision can move to another area and make this project successful in introducing more play into the city.
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