The School of Play Curriculum
Secondary School
Week Nine strengthens teamwork, strategic thinking, and gratitude through a mix of fast-paced games and meaningful reflection. Students begin with Legs 11, a hilarious non-verbal communication challenge that instantly builds connection, trust, and collaboration. They continue developing strategic decision-making and physical engagement through activities like the Area Dice Challenge, which combines maths, movement, and problem-solving. This blend of cognitive and physical tasks helps students understand how working together, thinking ahead, and staying active contribute to shared success.
The week also deepens students’ sense of gratitude and appreciation for others through the creative and heartfelt Super Buddies activity. Students identify the important people in their lives, transform one into a superhero character, and share the values they most admire, building empathy, confidence, and emotional awareness. The session ends with the Shared Goals Relay, reinforcing the power of collaboration and collective achievement. Together, these activities help students appreciate the people around them, understand the value of teamwork, and recognise how strategies, gratitude, and positive relationships shape their daily lives.
Weekly Lessons
Legs 11
Legs 11 is a fast, joyful, connection-based game that challenges groups of three to silently work together to display a total of eleven fingers. With no talking allowed, players must rely on non-verbal cues, intuition, and quick decision-making as they reveal their fingers at the same moment. Every round becomes a fun test of teamwork, spontaneity, and maths in its simplest form. The rapid countdowns keep the game energetic and engaging, while the two-minute time limit adds a layer of excitement as groups race to accumulate as many “Legs 11” wins as they can.
What makes Legs 11 unforgettable is the celebration. Each time a group successfully lands exactly eleven fingers, they must erupt into a loud, joyful ten-second celebration as if they’ve just won the lottery. This turns the room into an explosion of happiness, movement, and connection, breaking down barriers, building confidence, and lifting the collective energy. The game fosters teamwork, boosts morale, and creates instant camaraderie, making it a perfect warm-up, icebreaker, or energiser for students, staff, and participants of all ages.
Respectful Relationships
Understanding & Promoting Equality
Legs 11 supports equality by:
- Ensuring all players contribute equally, with every participant displaying fingers at the same moment.
- Valuing each group member’s contribution, as the total (11) can only be achieved when all three participants participate.
- Avoiding dominant roles, since verbal planning is not allowed, everyone’s action holds equal weight.
- Creating an inclusive activity, easily adapted for mixed ages, abilities, and comfort levels.
Building Healthy Relationships
The game naturally strengthens relationship skills by:
- Encouraging shared success, as groups celebrate loudly and joyfully after achieving 11.
- Building connection through play, which helps participants feel more comfortable and open with one another.
- Promoting trust, since players rely on teammates’ spontaneous choices without discussing strategy.
- Reinforcing positive peer interactions, as fun, laughter, and joint celebrations strengthen social bonds.
Developing Communication Skills
Although the game is played without verbal discussion, it powerfully builds communication skills by:
- Enhancing non-verbal communication, such as reading body language, group rhythm, and silent cues.
- Encouraging expressive communication, especially through creative celebrations after each successful round.
- Supporting emotional expression, as group joy and energy help students practise expressing enthusiasm safely.
- Modelling how teams can communicate effectively even without words, an essential workplace and leadership skill.
Enhancing Social & Emotional Intelligence
The activity promotes emotional and social learning through:
- Emotional regulation, as students manage excitement, surprise, and the unpredictability of each round.
- Empathy and awareness, noticing how teammates react and adjusting behaviour to support group success.
- Connection and belonging, with celebrations reinforcing a shared, positive experience.
- Spontaneity and playfulness, helping students become more comfortable taking positive social risks.
Challenging Stereotypes
Legs 11 challenges limiting stereotypes by:
- Making teamwork playful and inclusive, counteracting beliefs that high-energy play is only for certain genders or personalities.
- Normalising joyful expression, helping students challenge stereotypes that discourage emotional expression, especially among boys.
- Promoting equal participation, ensuring no student is positioned as the “leader” or “decision-maker.”
- Highlighting creativity, showing that celebrations, expression, and fun are valuable skills for everyone.
Recognising Rights
This activity reinforces students’ understanding of rights within a safe community:
- Right to participate equally, as everyone contributes a hand and has an equal role in group success.
- Right to feel safe expressing emotion, encouraged through celebratory moments that normalise joy and enthusiasm.
- Right to be included, since the game is simple, accessible, and adaptable for all abilities.
- Right to respectful interaction, emphasised through supportive team behaviour and positive group culture.
Super Buddies
Super Buddies is a heartfelt, creative reflection activity that encourages students to recognise and celebrate the important people in their lives. Students begin by listing five significant individuals, friends, family members, or role models, and identifying the values and character strengths they admire in each. This simple act of noticing kindness, courage, honesty, or resilience strengthens their gratitude and awareness of positive relationships. From that list, students select one standout person to become their “Number One Super Buddy.”
Students then bring their chosen person to life through a creative character design that transforms their admired qualities into superpowers. Whether imagined as a superhero, an animal, or a playful creature, the Super Buddy embodies the essence of the person they admire most. After designing and illustrating their character, students share their creations with the class, building connection, confidence, and appreciation for the strengths of others. The activity blends gratitude, creativity, and positive relationships into a powerful experience that helps students understand the importance of recognising and celebrating the people who lift them up.
Respectful Relationships
Understanding & Promoting Equality
Super Buddies supports equality by:
- Recognising the equal value of people from all areas of a student’s life, encouraging them to see strengths in diverse individuals.
- Promoting the idea that everyone has unique strengths, which challenges hierarchical thinking and celebrates individuality.
- Ensuring all students participate in the same reflective and creative process, giving equal voice to every student’s relationships and perspectives.
- Encouraging appreciation rather than comparison, reinforcing that everyone’s strengths contribute differently but meaningfully.
Building Healthy Relationships
The activity deepens relationship skills by:
- Encouraging students to reflect on positive influences, helping them recognise what supportive relationships look and feel like.
- Modelling gratitude and admiration, which strengthens bonds and reinforces respectful behaviours.
- Promoting open sharing, giving students a structured opportunity to talk about the people who matter to them.
- Helping students understand the role of strengths and character in healthy relationships, laying foundations for choosing respectful friendships.
Developing Communication Skills
Super Buddies builds communication competence through:
- Oral presentation opportunities, where students explain their Super Buddy and the strengths they identified.
- Descriptive and expressive language development, as students articulate abstract values and translate them into character features or “superpowers.”
- Active listening, as peers learn about each other’s important relationships and ask questions or share reflections.
- Visual communication, using drawing/design to express ideas that may be hard to articulate verbally.
Enhancing Social & Emotional Intelligence
The activity is rich in social and emotional learning:
- Self-awareness, as students reflect on what they value in others and why.
- Empathy, by identifying and appreciating the strengths, values, and character traits of significant people.
- Emotional literacy, as students label qualities like kindness, courage, perseverance, and translate them into meaningful representations.
- Relationship awareness, helping students understand the emotional impact others have on their well-being.
- Positive identity formation, as students recognise what kinds of support and influence shape who they are becoming.
Challenging Stereotypes
Super Buddies challenges stereotypes by:
- Allowing students to depict role models of any gender, background, or age, broadening their understanding of who can be admired.
- Encouraging creative character design, disrupting narrow ideas of what a “hero” looks like.
- Highlighting emotional strengths, such as kindness, empathy, and patience, traits traditionally undervalued in mainstream “hero” narratives.
- Promoting the idea that everyone has superpowers, regardless of gender, personality, or social role.
Recognising Rights
This activity supports understanding of rights by:
- Affirming every student’s right to meaningful, safe, and supportive relationships, modelled through the buddies they choose.
- Allowing students the right to express themselves creatively, without judgment or comparison.
- Creating a safe space for sharing personal stories, reinforcing respect and confidentiality within the classroom community.
- Highlighting universal human strengths, reinforcing the idea that everyone has the right to be valued for who they are.
Area Dice Challenge
Area Dice Challenge is a strategic maths-meets-movement game where two players compete to cover the most area on a shared grid. Each turn, players roll two dice to create the dimensions of a rectangle, calculate the area, and colour their shape on the grid using their unique marker. This process reinforces multiplication, spatial reasoning, and forward planning as players must decide where to place their rectangles to maximise their total area while potentially blocking their opponent. The game blends learning with strategy, making it an engaging way to build numeracy skills through play.
After completing each rectangle, players roll a single dice to determine a movement-based exercise and complete repetitions equal to the area they just coloured. This adds a fun physical component that boosts fitness, energy, and engagement. Area Dice Challenge encourages active learning, strategic thinking, and positive interaction, making it an excellent classroom warm-up, maths activity, or physical education crossover game suitable for a wide range of ages and settings.
Respectful Relationships
Understanding & Promoting Equality
Area Dice Challenge promotes equality by:
- Providing an activity where all students participate with the same tools and rules, ensuring equal access and opportunity.
- Creating a level playing field, where success depends on effort, strategy, and mathematical thinking rather than physical strength or ability.
- Encouraging fair play, as both players follow identical processes for rolling, calculating, colouring, and exercising.
- Positioning maths as an inclusive subject, where students of varying abilities can succeed through collaboration, discussion, and shared problem-solving.
Building Healthy Relationships
The activity strengthens relationship-building skills through:
- Collaborative decision-making when discussing strategies, clarifying rules, or checking each other’s area calculations.
- Respectful competition, where students learn to win and lose gracefully, maintaining positive peer interactions.
- Mutual encouragement, especially during the exercise components where students support each other’s efforts.
- Shared problem-solving, fostering connection through a meaningful, low-stakes challenge.
Developing Communication Skills
Area Dice Challenge enhances communication by:
- Encouraging mathematical dialogue, as students verbalise reasoning and check area calculations.
- Promoting clarifying questions, when players negotiate grid boundaries or interpret dice rolls.
- Building confidence in expressing mathematical thinking, strengthening both accuracy and clarity.
- Practising turn-taking language, reinforcing respectful conversational patterns in paired activities.
Enhancing Social & Emotional Intelligence
Students develop social–emotional skills through:
- Self-regulation, balancing excitement, frustration, and strategic thinking during gameplay.
- Resilience, as they adapt when opponents block space or when initial strategies don’t work out.
- Confidence building, through successful problem-solving and the physical challenge element.
- Body and mind awareness, integrating cognitive effort with movement for wellbeing.
Challenging Stereotypes
The activity challenges stereotypes by:
- Positioning maths and exercise as equally accessible to all students, countering the belief that some subjects or activities belong to certain genders or groups.
- Highlighting strategic thinking over physical dominance, reversing traditional competitive assumptions.
- Encouraging every student to engage with fitness in a way that is playful, non-threatening, and ability-inclusive.
- Representing mathematical success as varied, celebrating different thinking styles and approaches.
Recognising Rights
Area Dice Challenge reinforces students’ rights by:
- Affirming every student’s right to feel successful in learning, regardless of prior mathematical confidence.
- Ensuring safe participation, with clear rules, boundaries, and positive competition.
- Providing choice and agency, allowing players to strategise independently within the rules.
- Creating a respectful space, where students’ ideas, strategies, and calculations are valued.
Shared Goals Relay
Shared Goals Relay is a fast-paced, team-based activity that blends physical movement with meaningful connection and collective goal-setting. Working in small teams, students decide on a shared fitness goal and a shared personal-sharing goal, such as life goals, fears, challenges, or gratitudes, to complete during the relay. As they run laps, pass batons, and rotate through exercises, students also pause to share thoughts, experiences, and reflections with their teammates. This combination of movement and vulnerability creates a powerful environment for deeper connection, strengthening trust and understanding within the group.
The activity highlights the value of working toward common goals, celebrating progress, and supporting one another through both physical and personal challenges. After the relay, students participate in a guided debrief to reflect on their teamwork, communication, and what they learned about themselves and their peers. Shared Goals Relay energises the group, builds camaraderie, and provides a memorable experience centred around teamwork, empathy, and shared success, making it an ideal well-being, leadership, or community-building activity.
Respectful Relationships
Understanding & Promoting Equality
Shared Goals Relay promotes equality by:
- Ensuring every student has an equal role in the success of the team, regardless of athletic ability, confidence, or personality type.
- Creating a space where all contributions matter, whether completing laps, completing exercises, or sharing personal reflections.
- Emphasising effort over performance, helping all students feel valued for what they bring.
- Providing opportunities for diverse strengths to shine, such as leadership, encouragement, vulnerability, and teamwork, not just physical speed.
Building Healthy Relationships
The activity strengthens relationship-building skills through:
- Shared goal-setting, requiring teams to collaborate, negotiate, and agree on common objectives.
- Vulnerability and storytelling, as students share personal goals, fears, challenges, and things they are grateful for, deepening trust and connection.
- Collective celebration, reinforcing the idea that success is shared and achievements belong to the whole team.
- Collaborative problem-solving, helping teams support one another in completing both the physical and reflective tasks.
Developing Communication Skills
Shared Goals Relay enhances communication by:
- Requiring teams to communicate clearly as they set goals, ensuring every voice is heard and considered.
- Encouraging emotional expression, as students discuss fears, aspirations, gratitude, and personal experiences.
- Building active listening skills, especially during reflective sharing and debriefing discussions.
- Strengthening cooperative verbal and non-verbal communication during the relay and baton transitions.
Enhancing Social & Emotional Intelligence
Students develop social–emotional skills through:
- Self-awareness, as they reflect on their personal goals, challenges, and emotions.
- Empathy, through hearing teammates’ experiences, fears, and aspirations.
- Emotional regulation, balancing physical exertion with reflective sharing.
- Motivation and resilience, as they push through physical challenges together and support each other throughout the relay.
Challenging Stereotypes
The activity challenges stereotypes by:
- Highlighting that leadership and teamwork come in many forms, not just physical strength or athletic speed.
- Encouraging emotional openness, countering stereotypes that vulnerability is a weakness.
- Promoting equitable contribution, demonstrating that everyone, regardless of gender, background, fitness level, or personality, has value in both physical and reflective tasks.
- Reinforcing that success is collective, not individual, breaking down competitive norms that sometimes favour certain groups.
Recognising Rights
Shared Goals Relay reinforces students’ rights by:
- Establishing a psychologically safe environment, where students can share personal thoughts without judgment.
- Honouring each participant’s right to be heard, seen, and valued in both the physical and reflective components.
- Promoting respectful interactions, modelling how teams support one another through encouragement and understanding.
- Upholding students’ right to feel included, ensuring adaptable tasks so everyone can participate meaningfully.
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