Creating engaging play activities
Enhancing Everyday Play: Making Activities More Engaging and Inclusive
14 May 2026: 9 am – 12 noon
A common challenge for SEN practitioners is finding effective ways to fully engage the learners they support. This unique, hands-on course offers a fresh approach to adapting and enhancing everyday creative activities, including storytelling, games, and music-making, to make them more engaging.
Delegates will explore new practical strategies grounded in the principles of play and self-determination theory, helping them build meaningful engagement in a fun and purposeful way.
This autonomy-supportive practice enables practitioners to adapt current activities and develop new ones to meet the needs of the individuals they support, creating more engagement through play, improvisation, and reciprocity.
Session 1: The Challenge
This session begins by exploring a common challenge: how to engage individuals who do not participate in current activities or are frustrated with what we offer. From there, the session introduces the core approach of the training. Delegates will be invited to participate in a series of games and reflect on which elements of the games supported or limited engagement. We’ll start by playing the first game together, followed by small group discussions to reflect on the experience, and then come together as a larger group to share key insights.
This session will explore:
the nature of engagement
why engagement is an aim and a challenge
the qualities of an activity that make it more engaging
group reflective practice for insight and learning
Session 2: What’s the story?
In this session, delegates participate in two storytelling games that explore the themes of imagination, creativity, social engagement, and autonomy. Upon completing the game, small group discussions will provide delegates with the opportunity to reflect on their experience and share insights about which qualities of the game they found more engaging or less so. We discuss the underpinning theories that validate these insights.
In this session, we will explore:
how imagination supports engagement and play
how creativity and autonomy affect engagement
the principles of play theory
Session 3: Music-making
In this session, delegates will take part in two music-making activities. We will reflect on which aspects of each activity felt more or less engaging. These reflections will contribute to a developing understanding of engagement and play, building progressively throughout the course.
In this session, we will cover:
the qualities of music that enhance engagement
how rapport and interpersonal co-ordination can enhance engagement
Session 4: Understanding Engagement and Play
This session introduces three key approaches that can underpin meaningful activities for learners with additional needs: self-determination theory, play theory, and intrinsic motivation. Delegates will share examples of activities that currently struggle to engage the individuals they support. Through small-group discussions, participants will explore possible reasons behind this lack of engagement and identify factors that may contribute to it.
In this session, we will cover:
a summary of delegates’ insights from previous sessions
exploration/discussion of underpinning theories
reflective practice in small groups
Session 5: Adapting and devising activities for more engagement
In this final session, delegates will focus on applying the knowledge they’ve gained throughout the course. Working in small groups, they will revisit the less engaging activities discussed previously and use their new understanding to adapt and improve them. There will also be time to design fresh activities inspired by the principles of self-determination, intrinsic motivation, and play. The session will conclude with a sharing opportunity, allowing delegates to leave with a practical repertoire of new and engaging activity ideas.
9 am Admission and virtual tea/coffee to start the session!
9.05 am Welcome, introduction to the session with clarification of key outcomes.
9.10 am Session 1: The Challenge
9.30 am Session 2: What’s the story?
10.10 am Session 3: Music-making
10.40 am COFFEE
10.55 am Session 4: Understanding Engagement and Play
11.20 am Session 4: Adapting and devising activities for more engagement
11.45 am Q & A
12 pm Thank you and goodbye!
This course will be appropriate for classroom practitioners from special schools and colleges, mainstream settings with specialist SEN provision and early years settings, and working with pupils with severe/complex learning needs and autism, or both.
Matt Laurie is a highly experienced Music Specialist, Rapport-Based Communication and Intensive Interaction Consultant, Community Artist, Social Learning Leader and INSET trainer. Since 2002, Matt has enabled and supported changes in practice around social inclusion in many services around the UK and internationally including residential autism services, care homes, SEN schools, acute mental health units, dementia services, hospitals, charities and community groups.
As an experienced social learning leader, all of Matt’s training sessions are socially engaged, enjoyable, practical and thought-provoking. All sessions are designed to develop sustainable communities of practice, an approach to embedding practice developed in the 1980’s by Etienne Wenger with whom Matt has trained intensively.
From his years of experience developing the provision of Intensive Interaction and Music on a long term basis in multiple settings, Matt developed the more universal approaches of Rapport-Based Communication and Rapport-Based Musical Interaction. These approaches are now being implemented in many care and education services around the UK and internationally and Matt has published articles for PMLD Link (2021), ‘The Practical Handbook of Living with Dementia (2022), and as part of a collborative approach to supporting people with autism ‘Rhythmic Relating’ (Frontiers In Psychology 2024).
For Hirstwood training, Matt is offering the following courses:
Rapport-Based Communication and Intensive Interaction
Rapport-Based Musical Interaction
Developing More Engaging Activities
Supporting Staff and Student Wellbeing in times of distress and conflict
In addition to his work in the context of sensory practice for people with additional needs, Matt also runs a local community music group, teaches peripatetic music lessons at a local secondary school, and practices and teaches qigong and zen meditation at his local classes.
The cost is £149 plus VAT per delegate. You can select multiple places on the booking form.
You can pay by credit card for this booking or request an invoice on the booking form.
The recording of this event will be in your account at online.hirstwood.com. You will access this using the email address on the booking form and your password (instructions for creating your password are in the joining information).
Here you will find:
a digital recording of the event
a transcript of the Zoom chat
These will be available for 10 days after the event.
We will suggest practical reflective practice for this event to support you in implementing your key takeaways from this session in the classroom.
We’ll also offer a toolkit of additional resources to help, which may include further documentation, videos or links to valuable resources/websites.
Please join our Facebook Group, Sensory Support Spaghetti, to connect with us and other like-minded professionals – for everything sensory!
