Val Sabin Active Play Every Day Level 1 (3 – 4 years) and Level 2 (4 – 5 years):

The Active Every Day Level 1 and Level 2 programmes has been constructed to include a variety of activities including the Activate programme, Sport Time and Action Kids Sessions.

Active Play Every Day Sample Pages

View Active Play Every Day Sample Pages

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Activate Programme

The Activate programme comprises simple repetitive patterns of movement to music projected through the interactive whiteboard, which are repeated for 2 weeks before moving on to the next 2-week programme.

The activities are repeated daily for up to 10 mins in the morning and up to 5 mins later in the day (after lunchtime is most effective).

This encourages the development of listening and attention skills, understanding, communication and speaking skills.

It brings the children together and develops self confidence and self-awareness and over 2 weeks children become familiar with the patterns and fluent in the movements. Some children would then like the opportunity to lead one of the activities.

These Activate activities are fun to do, and engage and motivate the children into activity, however, there are many more benefits – including personal social, emotional and behavioural.

The Activate exercises are chronological and developmental age-appropriate and are particularly designed to improve various elements of physical fluency, stimulate the cerebellar-vestibular systems and intensively exercise the neural connections between the right and left hemispheres of the brain.

The activity, progression and extension exercises provide a very comprehensive upper and lower body gross-motor exercise range. Also included are fine motor exercises, balance moves, hand-eye co-ordination moves, eye exercises and speech patterns, all to sound rhythms.

Sporty Time

“Sporty Time” (a skill-a-week) has been included in the “Active Play Every Day” programme to encourage the development of:

• co-ordination
• balance
• mobility
• spatial awareness
• manipulation
• aiming skills
• concentration
• self-awareness

“Sporty Time” skills have been allocated to each week of the 36 week programmes.

The skills are simple and progressive, and can be introduced to the class at the beginning of each week. Once children know what to do, they can pick up the beanbag or ball, and try the skill on their own in any free play time.

There could be a daily “Sporty Time” when for a few minutes, children have fun doing the activity together and can celebrate any success as a group.

Action Kids Sessions

Active Kids sessions. Every 2 weeks there are several Action Kids session plans available for adult-initiated activities for physical development (3 for level 1 and 4 for level 2).

These include warm ups and cool-down activities and activities leading to gymnastics, dance, games, athletics sound and music; spatial awareness and parachute games and are presented in a structure of: – 1) Warm-up 2) main activity, 3) main activity progression, 4) calm down, 5) benefits.

Practitioners can choose how to use these plans – either as a guided session, or selecting extracting, exploring and developing an individual section and enjoying it as an activity on it’s own. They can be explored in a hall, outside space or on the carpet area as appropriate and can be linked to any of the other areas of Learning to fit in with any learning emphasis at the time. The ‘Benefits’ section will provide some guidelines for links.