Top School Playground Markings To Enhance English Skills
Updated on: December 9, 2024
If school playground markings conjure images of worn track lines and faded hopscotch, we’ve got so much more for you. Our English playground markings for schools are a great example of how far we’ve come.
Constructed from thermoplastic, a fantastic hardwearing material, our playground designs for English learning are exciting, vibrant, and imaginative. From reading to phonics, SPaG and writing, we’ve got designs to support learning across the English curriculum.
Suitable for EYFS, KS1, KS2, 3 and more, our collection is designed in line with the English national curriculum. You can also commission your own bespoke designs.
From grammar to spelling, phonics and descriptive writing, here’s our roundup of some of our most popular school playground markings for English. Providing you with plenty of inspiration for your own outdoor spaces, you may even find our ideas trigger the development your own custom designs.
These ideas include some of our superb school playground equipment that’s also perfect for use in conjunction with English learning. Explore ideas throughout for English outdoor learning activities.
Top School Playground Markings To Enhance English Skills
At Fun & Active Playgrounds, none of our designs are fixed. Schools are highly personalised spaces so it’s crucial you can tailor any of our school playground designs to match your pupils’ needs. Similarly, you can order any custom design and arrange playground marking removals with us too.
School Playground Designs: Writing
Creative Writing School Playground Markings
From our activity play panels to our playground markings, we have so many imaginative designs ready to support pupils’ creative writing. For example, our Under The Sea Phonics Phase 2 Playground Marking offers usage for English learning beyond the phonemes displayed.
Step to the edge of the porthole, close your eyes for a minute, open them and….
Here’s an idea for a creative writing outdoor learning activity for a group using our Under The Sea Phonics with a TA or LSA.
English outdoor learning activity idea: Under The Sea Playground Marking
Objective: Use adjectives to describe a setting. (Part 1: Generate ideas in preparation for descriptive writing the next day)
- Together discuss different reasons why you might get on a boat and where you might go. Tell pupils to stand on the edge of the porthole and close their eyes.
- Tell pupils to open their eyes on your finger click. Tell pupils they are on a boat going somewhere. Ask where they’re going. Tell children to look through the porthole. Ask pupils to describe what they can see. Encourage the use of adjectives rather than nouns.
- Tell pupils to climb up to the top deck and tell you what they can see now. Ask them to show you how they feel about the journey using their whole body. For example, they could jump up and down with excitement. TA records responses as notes on large piece of card. Circle adjectives and make suggestions to up-level some.
- Tell pupils to sit around the edge of the bottom of the porthole. Give pupils a circular piece of white card and a tub of colouring pencils or thin crayons. Ask children to draw what they’ve seen so far on the journey. They can use more than one piece of card to depict multiple sights if they wish.
- Give pupils a card person silhouette. Ask them to draw what they’re wearing on the journey and how they feel.
- Each pupil stands up and shares what they saw on their journey using their card picture, whilst using their body to demonstrate how they felt along the way.
Delivering bright, visual, tactile stimuli in the relaxed environment of an outdoor setting, our creative educational playground equipment and school playground markings can provide a useful backdrop to the creation of imaginative compositions.
Particularly for pupils who find it difficult to be transported somewhere else and visualise a different setting, the action of travelling outside and stepping into the marking, where there are familiar visual cues, can make so much difference.
See more designs ideal for creative writing
Letter Formation
At Fun Play, our playground markings are made from thermoplastic. Thermoplastic school playground markings offer superior endurance, delivering phenomenal resistance against scuffs, stomps, and severe weather.
Providing vibrant, hardwearing, non-toxic designs that endure, support staff can get really creative at harnessing all the learning opportunities our playground markings for schools provide.
Head to our Letter Collection for playground markings that support letter recognition, letter formation, recall of alphabetical order and vowels or check out our best playground markings for teaching Literacy. Easy cleaning and protection against scratches and daily wear means children can practise learning the letters for years to come.
Reading School Playground Markings
For our earliest readers we have a large selection of phonics playground markings to support children at different stages of their learning journey. From the alphabet to Phase 2 and 3, we provide specially designed phonics playground designs for to help children learn to read.
To support pupils working beyond Phase 3, we can also create existing designs, or a bespoke design of your own, for higher phases. However, our reading equipment stretches beyond phonics and EYFS reading skills.
Head over to our school playground equipment and you’ll find wordsearch play panels, multilingual play panels, sign language and more. Back in our Educational Playground Markings Collection, a wide number of designs, such as our Skeleton Playground Marking, provide exciting contexts for reading.
SPaG School Playground Markings
For spelling, punctuation and grammar, there’s so much you can do with our surface designs and activity panels as a backdrop to learning. Our phonics playground markings feature phonemes for each phase in imaginative settings familiar to children of all ages.
English outdoor learning activity idea: Phonics Assessment For Phase 2 and 3
- Take a small group of children, a tray of unifix and a tablet to the Under The Sea Phonics Phase 3 Playground Marking. Give each pupil a stick of unifix cubes in one colour so each pupil has a different colour.
- Spread pupils around the marking and ask them to place their coloured unifix at their feet. Tell children when you say the phoneme, they’ve got to put 1 unifix on the matching grapheme, then run back to their spot.
- TA calls out the phoneme and counts down from 5. By 5, pupils must have placed one of their coloured unifix on the grapheme of their choice and returned to their place. Repeat for as many phonemes as you wish.
- Take a picture of the marking with the children standing around the outside holding up their remaining coloured unifix and the graphemes in the middle with the unifix still on them.
- Collect in all the unifix and head back to the school building. Open the picture on the interactive whiteboard in the IT suite, group work room or classroom. Together, go through the correct answers. Print and stick in children’s books as assessment for Phase 2 and 3.
- Keep a record for yourself and plan next steps according to outcomes in preparation for the Phonics Screening Check later in the year.
Our Alphabet Jump and Shapes A-Z Playground Markings provide colourful, outdoor activity space for spelling activities in small groups. Here’s an idea for a group spelling activity for Alphabet Jump. All of our thermoplastic playground designs are open-ended so there’s no right to wrong way to engage with them.
English outdoor learning activity idea: Spelling Beat The Clock
- Take a large dice and a small group of children to the Alphabet Jump Playground Marking. Tell children to jog around the marking and stop on your clap.
- Clap your hands and call freeze. Ask each child to stand near to the closest mark on the edge of the marking. Get each pupil to roll the dice from where they are and move that number of places along the marking then call out the letter they are on.
- TA records each letter on a large piece of card. Depending on the ability of the pupils, the TA may or may not have vowel cards to add to the mix or a certain phoneme all the children must use for example.
- Ask children to gather together. Read through the letters recorded on the card together.
- Now set the timer and challenge pupils to generate a certain number of words, using a specific number of the letters from the card – dependent on the ability of the pupils. To lower the difficulty, don’t ask every child to roll the dice or have children working in pairs.
- When the times up, pupils share all words generated and discuss spelling strategies.
And that’s just a few of our most popular English playground designs! Remember all our designs are bespoke so you can commission any ideas you have in mind.
