Early Years Sessions
Creative play, making and immersive experiences for young children.
We create playful, hands-on experiences for nurseries, pre-schools, early years settings and reception classes. From immersive playscapes to artist-led sessions, we give young children space to explore, imagine, make and play.
What can you book?
PLAYSCAPE HIRE
Bring an immersive Make Play playscape to your setting, with our artists facilitating the experience.
Our playscapes create a world for children to explore through imaginative, open-ended play. We bring the playscape to you and our artists can facilitate the experience, helping children discover the space, materials and possibilities for play.
What you can expect:
A carefully designed immersive play environment. Children might explore materials, build, create, experiment, tell stories or invent their own games.
Make Play artists facilitate the experience
Opportunities for child-led exploration and imaginative play
A session tailored to your children, space and needs
Good for: nursery groups, pre-schools, reception classes, early years events and special activity days.
CREATIVE WORKSHOPS
Artist-led making and play sessions designed around your children, setting or theme.
We design playful making sessions around your children, setting, interests or theme. We could explore materials, build, create or make something together.
Sessions can be adapted for different ages, group sizes and spaces, and we can work with your existing curriculum or develop something completely open-ended.
What you can expect:
Experienced creative practitioners
Hands-on making and experimentation
Child-led and playful approaches
Activities adapted to your setting and group
Materials and creative ideas to take away and continue
BESPOKE PROJECTS
Have a bigger idea? Let's make something together. Want to develop something longer-term? We can work with your setting to create a bespoke creative project or explore potential funding partnerships.
We can work with early years settings and partners to develop longer-term creative projects, bringing together play, making, storytelling and your own environment or community.
This could be a series of creative sessions, a special event, a new play environment or a project developed with external funding.
We can work with you to:
Develop the idea
Design the creative programme
Connect with artists and partners
Explore potential funding opportunities
Deliver and evaluate the project
What to expect from one of our sessions
Before your session
We'll talk to you about your children, your setting, your space and what you'd like to achieve. We'll agree the practical details with you beforehand.
When we arrive
We'll bring the materials or playscape and set everything up. We will introduce the children to the experience and create the conditions for them to explore.
During the session
Children are encouraged to make choices, experiment, play and follow their own ideas. Artists facilitate rather than directing every activity.
Afterwards
We'll pack everything away and, where appropriate, share ideas for extending the creative experience in your setting.
PRACTICAL INFORMATION
AGES
Our Early Years sessions and playscapes are suitable for children up to 5 years old
GROUP SIZE
We tend to work with groups of up to 30 children if we bring a playscape. For more bespoke projects or creative sessions we can discuss this further.
SESSION LENGTH
90 minutes is usually the optimal amount of time!
LOCATION
We come to you! You just need an indoor space
SPACE REQUIRED
We need a large clear room to set up in and parking nearby for unloading and packing up
COST
Our playscape sessions cost £300 for a half day session (90 mins activity plus setting up / packing away and travel). For more bespoke sessions or sessions that are designed specifically for your setting we can provide a quote.
FACILITATION
Make Play will facilitate your session. Staff should be available to support and supervise the children as per your setting.
Anything else I need to know?
Our sessions are artistic interpretations of play with all provision handmade by our team. While everything in the sessions is safe and designed for children, there are potential risks due to the handmade and loose part play elements we include. Please ensure you supervise children at all times.
Ready to book?
Tell us a little about your setting, the children you'd like us to work with and which type of experience you're interested in.
We'll get back to you to discuss availability, options and costs.