St Francis' Primary School, Castlewellan

Play Based learning

14th Feb 2026

Play is a wonderful way for children to consolidate the skills and knowledge that they’ve learnt during all aspects of the curriculum including Literacy, Numeracy and The World Around Us. It also develops social and emotional skills as well as talking and listening, PDMU and encouraging investigation and the confidence to express opinions. 

All of our play areas are developed using the learning objectives of the topic/theme, the children’s input and their assessment each week of the areas of learning that they enjoyed. The children also express their ideas on how we can expand a centre of learning, create a new area of learning or remove an area that was unproductive. 

Most importantly it’s lots of fun! 😃