Yeading Infants School
Transforming Outdoor Play into a Real-Life School Tuck Shop.
The School
Yeading Infant and Nursery School is located in Hillingdon in London. The school is one of the largest infant schools in the area with 480 children between three and seven years of age. The school’s philosophy is to provide the children with the best possible all-round education in a safe caring and loving environment.
With the school’s motto being ‘Sow the Seeds of Success’, there is a strong bias towards encouraging the children to be involved in extra-curricular activities such as gardening, cooking and forest school.
Yin’s Café – The Concept
The school was keen to provide particularly the younger children with an outdoor play structure that would help them understand everyday activities and social scenarios that would encounter as they grow up.
Outdoor For School’s sales consultant and CAD team worked closely with the teachers at Yeading to create a design that would be a colourful, attractive, permanent structure which the children would look forward to playing in.
It was felt that colourful ‘Ascot Shelters’ (outdoor canopies) together with a built-in shop and role-play kitchen would provide the children with plenty of play and learning opportunities. ‘Yin’s Café’ was therefore developed to provide role play activities for younger children in the form of a shop and kitchen. At the same time, it would also offer more structured learning facilities for slightly older children in the form of a fully functioning school tuck shop.
Open For Business!
Yin’s Café is now a fully functioning school snack shop. In keeping with the school’s strong emphasis on extra-curricular activities, the only snacks sold in the tuck shop are cooked by the children themselves. Yin’s Café is open for selling snacks every Friday and the children use the school’s own currency to purchase food – points earned by the children throughout the week for positive achievements.
The outdoor facility has been an enormous success. It has provided an outdoor area for younger children to role play under shelter, but also enabled older children to learn about basic business skills, cooking, social skills, mathematics and real-life everyday scenarios.
