We Play Festival X Little Learners

We were delighted to take part in We Play Festival, held at The Scottish Storytelling Centre in Edinburgh!

We Play celebrates children’s free play in Scotland in a beautiful pop-up play café combined with talks, workshops, storytelling, wellbeing activities, music, and film.

The creator of the project, Reyhaneh says… ‘We Play aims to blaze a trail for a kind of public space we want to see cultivated right across Scotland: one which fosters community, support, and knowledge exchange between diverse individuals and organizations concerned with children’s rights, play, equity, and innovation. At the heart of this initiative is to prototype a radical new public space for children and families where research, knowledge exchange, teaching, practice, and everyday life are integrated, so that the highest quality of early learning and childcare is provided to all children (with a focus on the most marginalized children), and young children’s rights are implemented.’

She continues ‘As part of the project, we will co-design through community engagement what this space could look like (e.g. physically and in terms of its ethos, ways of working, activities and practices, etc), by engaging with a range of organisations working with children and families in the early years, with a particular focus on families from marginalised and disadvantaged backgrounds.’

This is where Little Learners stepped in, creating an afternoon long play session that showcased our ‘greatest hits’ – think Tuff Trays, Sensory Play, Messy Play and Mark Making. We began the session with a range of physical activities with our ever popular dance scarves, creating giant marks that represented each of the four Mark Makers. Then, the messy play started and around 30 children explored all manner of activities – Crazy Soap and Flour Painting proved very popular!

We had a wonderful time creating some extra special messy play, chatting to parents and spreading the word about our incredible franchisees in Edinburgh, Susan and Emma!

Following our session, our head franchisor Rachel Fay, contributed to a panel discussing Neurodiversity and the children’s sector with Louise Day.

We Play Festival is a collaboration between The University of Edinburgh, The Play Cafe Project, Froebelian Futures, and The Scottish Storytelling Centre supported by a host of other partners such as Little Learners!