Session 2: Observing in the playground

Introduction

Most children and young people will spend around 1,500 hours of their life in their school playground. For many children, this will be more time than they spend in any other outdoor play setting. This unstructured outdoor time is more than double the time that children spend in PE lessons.

Figure 1

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This is a photograph of a group of school children running in the playground.

Figure 1

The focus of this session is observing children in the school playground and finding out what children and adults think about school playtimes.

By the end of this session, you should be able to:

• recognise some basic design principles for school playgrounds
• understand children’s views of the school playground
• develop skills to evaluate play spaces.