Play Based Learning

Play is the language of childhood. It teaches children about their world, how to collaborate, and that they can have impact. And it’s fun. When a child struggles at school or in life, it’s often because they don’t have the right foundations in place. Developmental Play trains children with these foundations.

Play Based Learning (PBL) is a program that is run in the Junior year levels at NNGPS. The purpose of PBL is to provide students with a range of opportunities through play to develop communication, creativity, and collaboration skills. During PBL sessions, students are given the autonomy to work at any station on any task they want to. The teacher’s role is to move throughout the stations scaffolding students with the tasks they are taking part in, having authentic conversations with students, asking explicit and specific questions, modelling types of play and demonstrate sharing and cooperation.

Some examples of our PBL stations are:

• Creative (art and craft, painting, drawing, building and designing)
• Imaginative (dress ups, real world scenarios such as shops, vets, cafe, train station)
• Sensory (sand trays, play dough, water play)
• Discovery (magnifying glasses, tools to measure, investing pants and seeds)
• Literacy and Numeracy (creating own books, counting, and sorting various materials)

The activities within the stations are changed on a regular basis and the student’s feedback, interests, ideas and suggestions are taken on board into our PBL stations to maximise student agency and engagement.