Holy Family S.N.S introduced Playworks in 2016. The slogan of Playworks is that Play Works For Every Kid. We introduced Playworks to improve yard time and to give the children in the school more opportunities to play with each other.
When we started in 2016, we trained 32 young people from our 6th classes as junior coaches. Now, this school year, 2017/2018, we have 68 volunteers from the 6^th classes who will be involved at different times throughout the year.
The Junior Coaches lead games in the yard. We have four yards in our school and the games take place in one yard each day with the new third classes having Playworks twice a week. The junior coaches wear high vis jackets. They organise active games such as Bomb, Switch and Skipping in the busy area of the yard and board games, art activities, maths challenges, talents shows in the quiet area of the yard.
The Junior Coaches meet every second Thursday to make decisions about what games and activities will be on the yard for the following month.
Playworks has been a great success in our school and we hope to make it bigger and better this year.
There are over 50 schools across Ireland using Playworks techniques in their yards and we are very proud to be one of those schools.