Committee newsletter

February 2022

Moving to the new hall

The new hall is now ready and we will be moving all of our pre-school sessions into the new hall after half term. To access the new hall you will need to go up the new path along the farthest right hand side of the Methodist Church and wait along that path until the staff open the doors. Pick up will be from the same place, i.e. down the path on the far right hand side of the Church building.

We have been familiarising the children with the new space over the last 2 weeks, and there will inevitably be some settling in to be done once we get there, but we hope to invite parents back into our setting in the near future to assist with coats and bags and to give you the opportunity to talk to your key worker.

Session start times

Having asked all parents what start times they might prefer for the morning pre-school session there was no clear indication from the responses that it would be better to start earlier, so we decided at our last committee meeting that the session times for the morning will remain as 9 am - 12 pm, but we hope to allow parents to come into the hall slightly earlier to help their child(ren) get organised and put coats away etc, during the 10 minutes before the session starts.

Popp & Play

Some of you may already be familiar with the new space through Popp and Play, and after half term Popp and Play will continue to run on Friday mornings but will swap back to the old hall for the remainder of this academic year.

Pre-school timetable

As you know we have been in discussions with the Church about increasing the number of the pre-school sessions that we run, in the hope that we could add Wednesday afternoon or Tuesday morning to our current timetable.

Sadly the Church wish to restrict us to running only 6 pre-school sessions in the new hall, so that the hall can also be made available to other users, and they have told us that we cannot use Tuesday at all.

As we already have a dozen children attending pre-school on Friday mornings, we have agreed to continue running the Friday morning pre-school session for the remainder of this academic year and will then change our timetable from September 2022 to run our six sessions over 3 full days, Monday, Wednesday and Thursday.

And from September 2022 Popp & Play will move back into the new hall on Friday mornings.

Garden area

We have invested in a new shed for our equipment during the build project and will be hoping to develop some specific play areas for our children in the new garden space by the end of this academic year.

Please do support our fundraising group in their events and efforts to enable us to do this. Most information is posted on facebook so please do follow us on fb if you haven’t done so already.

New committee members

We are always looking for new people to come and join in with the committee and as parents you are automatically ‘members’ of the pre-school and have the right to have a say in what we do and how we run.

We are now looking for a Membership Secretary which is one of the key committee roles. The Membership Secretary liaises with the parents and with the staff and organises the forms for new starters, visits and settling sessions. If you think you have the skills and the time to be our Membership Secretary for a while, please get in touch and we will arrange for you to have a chat with Jane, our current Membership Secretary.

Have a good half term!

Anne, Debs, Catherine, Jane, Claire & Jemma