Weekend Activities

My BD5 Play Pod

Play sessions every Saturday from 11.00am to 1.00pm

What are Play Pods and who are they for?

Play Pods are converted shipping containers holding a range of play equipment. They provide a base for supervised, open access outdoor play for children in the local community. The My BD5 Play Pod welcomes all children up to the age of 12 years in the BD5 area.  Parents or adult carers of children under the age of 6 are required to stay with their children. Children aged 6 and upwards are allowed to come and go by themselves.

Who runs the Play Pod sessions?

MY BD5 Play Pod is staffed by skilled and qualified children’s workers from  the Play Team at Bradford Council East Locality and local volunteersfrom MY BD5. All Pod staff are CRB checked. The job of the staff is to support children’s play and to ensure their safety.

What is open access play?

The Play Pod does not offer child care.  Open access means that children aged 6 and over can come and go when they choose, just as they would when playing out in a local park or in the street.  Please ensure that your child has somewhere safe to go when s/he leaves the Play Pod.

Children at the Pod can control their own play. They are encouraged to develop their own ideas, and to respect one another, the equipment, the environment and the staff.   Activities are spontaneous and challenging, with sessions that are likely to include den and structure building, element play, art and craft activities, physical play and sports. 

Graffiti Project

My BD5 launched a very exciting Graffiti Art project for gifted and talented children led by Sam Penrose.  The project was over 6 weeks from Saturday 11th June to Saturday 9th July 2011; the project took place at Marshfield Primary (Hope Avenue site) and was from 11.00 am till 1 pm.

The project was a huge success, the children were chosen by their teachers. The aim of the project was to decorate and design art work for the My BD5 play pod and MyBD5 FC which are both situated at Hope Avenue.  The group took inspiration from magazines and various templates and learnt different graffiti art techniques, the children sketched their ideas on to paper and each week practised their designs on the containers using spray cans. By the end of the 6 weeks the children had come up with some excellent designs which can be seen on the play pod.

Textile Project

My BD5 delivered 2 textile projects in November 2010 over 6 weeks, sessions ran on a Saturday morning from 10 am till 12 pm at the Park lane Centre and in the  afternoon from 1 pm till 3 pm at the Mayfield centre. The project was delivered by a local artist Musarat Raza and involved children visiting Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester on week 1 to gain inspiration for the project, this was followed up in week 2 with a visit to Cartwright Hall. Children took inspiration from the art collections on display and used those ideas to form their own designs.

Please click here for more information about our recent Textile Project

Gardening project

An exciting new project was introduced to children in MY BD5 in partnership with Bolling Hall Museum and  BEES , linking the Hall with the local cluster of 3 Primary schools. The aim was to develop the beds at the front of the Museum to become herb gardens similar to how it would have been during the Edwardian period. The beds were overgrown and unkempt were in need of maintenance. The sessions took place on Saturday afternoons and ran for 6 weeks with 12 pupils at each session from Bowling Park and St Stephens. They were involved in the preparation of the areas and learning about the herbs that had been used previously both for culinary and medicinal purposes.

Each week the children would work on improving the existing beds but also planting new herbs, the project ended with a celebration where parents were invited and certificates were presented by Nick Milsom from BEES as well the herb garden at the front of the Museum looking excellent.

Art Project

My BD5 launched a 5 week Art project from Saturday 18th June 2011 to Saturday 16th July 2011. The sessions were based at St Stephens’s Church for year 5 pupils from Newby, Bowling Park and St Stephens’s primary schools. Sessions ran from 1.30 pm till 3.30 pm.
 

The project was delivered by local artist Zareena Bano and focussed on Mosaic and the work of the artist Gaudi. Children learnt about mosaic techniques using different materials (such as tiles, pebbles, nuggets, mirrors, shells, buttons). They also learnt tile painting - using Gaudi's famous designs.