Burnie Campus Principal

Learning through Play 

As a school leadership team, we have been delving into the pedagogy of play and how we can embed playful learning into our campuses and students' education. 

Most recently at Burnie we dove into two new initiatives, the International Day of Play and Lego Serious Play. 

International Day of Play 

This was in its inaugural year of running and we wanted to take the opportunity to embrace the day and all that we can learn from structured, intentional and free form play. As a result, last Wednesday we ran an alternate school program with our students. In the week leading up to this day, the teachers shared a PowerPoint with their class on what the International Day of Play meant and why we were embracing it in the school. They talked about the ideas behind this initiative and what we would be doing at Leighland Christian School. Each class also unpacked the Biblical Thread ‘Relishing Play’ as we brought a biblical perspective to the day. 

On Wednesday in the morning block, students and teachers stayed in their own classes and engaged in play-based activities, such as Lego, puzzles, board games, drawing, playdough and the like after an extended Worship Wednesday. During the middle block, they teamed up with a buddy class after we ran an extended Fitness Friday session led by the student leaders and their teachers. In the afternoon, classes attended sessions positioned around the school that included a dance party with Mr Robertson, ball skills with Mr Marmion, board games with Mr House, creative colouring with Mrs Enniss, playdough with Mrs Shepherd and Mrs Porch and water colour painting with Mrs Fa’ase’e and Mrs van Rooyen. Every 30 mins they rotated between activities. 

At the end of the day, I asked students what they had learnt over the International Day of Play. They shared comments such as ‘learning can be fun’, ‘I found out that when I play, I also am learning’, ‘it felt like I was in Kinder again for a little while’, ‘I learnt about how my friends learn as they play’, ‘I could not believe the day was already over’ and ‘when are we going to do it again’? 

That same afternoon at the staff meeting, I introduced staff to Lego Serious Play. The purpose behind this was to allow all staff an opportunity to share their thoughts and experiences while solving a question or set of questions/problems using Lego. Staff were all in and immediately engaged. They were able to articulate their responses and use Lego to design a way of showing their thoughts and opinions around our key question. 

While it was a fun-filled day with laughter floating across the school and zero behaviour issues, it was also a day where children got to experience firsthand the joy that comes through using play-based tools to teach a concept and to develop their learning of the world around them. Teachers embraced the concept and we were able to make some adaptive changes to the process that we will be using for Family Assemblies from the beginning of Term 3. 

Pasi Sahlberg in his book, Let the Children Play, with co-author William Doyle (Oxford; 2019, p50) describes play in childhood education as “those engaging activities, both self-guided and guided by adults, that allow a child to use her or his creativity, curiosity, and imagination in a process that can have powerful intellectual and physical benefits for the child”. 

As a whole campus, we got to experience exactly that this week.

Elizabeth Scheu

Burnie Campus Principal