Pre-school
Powerful pre-schoolers
Ready for life’s adventures
Pre-schoolers are extremely funny. They have strong opinions about small things. They tell long stories with no ending. They fall in love with a bin lorry and stay loyal to it for months.
Their interests are fierce and specific too: space, snails, ballet, the exact mechanics of rain. We follow them, because a child who’s interested is a child who’s learning.
They also have friends now, real ones, with history. They know who they want to sit next to and they’ve been through things together. That matters more at this age than almost anything else, and it’s the part of the year children remember.
Moving up to Pre-school is something children look forward to for two years beforehand. They know they’re the oldest, and they carry it well.
Through our Children’s Council they get a real say in nursery life, sharing ideas and voting on the things that matter to them. Their voice counts here.
They take on real responsibility too. As Planet Protectors they become Water Warriors, Recycling Rangers, Garden Guardians and Electricity Explorers: turning off taps, sorting recycling, looking after the garden. And through Green Grass Academy they’re out in local parks building dens, going on nature hunts and taking on new physical challenges.
So our first job is not to get in the way of any of it.
At home and at nursery
This is the age children become properly good company. They ask questions you can’t answer. They tell you what they think of your cooking. They have theories.
They’re also negotiating, testing and pushing, because working out where their limits are is the job. That’s the same thing as the theories and the opinions. A personality arriving, all at once, with the volume up.
Tell us about it. What they’re into, what they’ve decided they think, what’s changed at home. It all helps, and none of it will surprise us.
And enjoy it. These are the years your child becomes recognisably themselves, and they go quickly.
Ready for school and
ready for life
School will come, and your child will be ready. We want every child to leave us Life Ready: caring, capable, confident and curious, ready to learn, ready to explore and ready for life’s adventures. But the things that make a child ready for school are the same things that make them ready for everything after it, and none of them are taught sitting down.
Managing yourself when something goes wrong. Waiting. Asking for help. Being wrong without falling apart. Noticing that someone else is sad. Getting your own coat on when it’s raining and you’d rather not.
Those are learned in the middle of playing with other children, hundreds of times, with early educators nearby who know your child well enough to see what they’re ready for next.
None of it is accidental. Behind the mud and the snails there’s a curriculum, built on the Early Years Foundation Stage, and every early educator in the room knows what your child is working towards. Early maths sits inside sharing out the snacks. Early reading is in the story they’ve asked for eleven times, and in Little Wandle, which introduces sounds and early phonics in a carefully sequenced, playful way. And the strength to hold a pencil has been building since they were born, and we know what helps: climbing, carrying and Zig-Zag Zumba, which builds the core strength and control confident mark-making needs.
It doesn’t look like lessons, and at this age it shouldn’t. It feels natural and joyful to your child, but it’s purposeful and intentional behind the scenes. They need friends, room to move and early educators who know exactly what they’re doing.
Belonging and ready for what’s next
By pre-school, many children have years of history here. The people in the room know what they find funny, what they find hard and who they want to sit next to.
That matters more in the pre-school year than at any other point, because this is when the next step stops being obvious. We observe what your child is ready to learn next, encourage them to have a go and extend their thinking with new words, questions and challenges. We’re ambitious on their behalf. Including the things nobody puts on a report: waiting their turn, asking for help, doing up their own coat.
This is our Powerful Pre-schoolers stage: thinking, creating, communicating and contributing, so they head to school caring, capable, confident and curious.
Preparing for school together
You will worry about school. Everyone does.
You shouldn’t have to manage it, though, and neither should your child. The observing, the planning, the noticing of what’s next, the honest conversations about where they are. That’s ours. We’ll tell you what we’re working on and what we’ve seen, and we’ll tell you early if something needs attention. You’ll also see where your child is against the EYFS areas of learning, without having to ask for it.
Your child doesn’t need to feel any of that. They need to be playing with their friends.
Feelings, friendships and kindness
Pre-schoolers are old enough to understand that other people have feelings, and old enough to start acting on it.
This is the year we help children understand their own feelings, and learn what to do with them. Not to suppress them, but to notice them, name them and choose how to respond. And they learn a great deal of it from how we speak to them.
When their time with us is finished, your child will have learned to name what they’re feeling and do something about it. They’ll know the words to My Magic Breath, from our own wellbeing programme, and they’ll know it works: the breath, the butterfly hug, the hum.
That’s a life skill.
Come and see
Your child should come home with grass on their knees, having spent forty minutes on something nobody planned, and something to tell you about a thing their friend said. That isn’t a nice extra alongside the learning. At this age it is the learning.
So come at a time that suits you rather than us, ideally when the room is busy. Then listen. A room that’s right has laughing in it, and the early educators are usually in on the joke.