Pre-School Life

Our Meals

Forest Row Community Pre-School provides hot meals at lunchtime and during After-School Club, as well as healthy snacks during both morning and afternoon sessions.

We eat our meals together family style, which helps our children try new foods and supervising adults can encourage healthy eating habits by role modeling them. Eating together also supports development of motor, language, and social skills, and provides opportunities for children to learn about food.

The Pre-School team are experienced in adapting the menu to take into account specific dietary requirements with ease.

Optional Activities

The PreSchool also offers optional activities from external providers such as weekly Spanish play sessions from KidsLingo, and football lessons. Please contact the administrator to learn more.

School Uniform

With all the opportunities for outings, inside and outside free flow, and messy play, we ask parents to support our active environment by ensuring their children are prepared with a variety of clothing and items such as plimsolls and wellies.

There are no branded uniform requirements for these items but the Pre-School does facilitate regular school uniform orders from our suppliers through the year.

Recommended Clothing

Documentation

At Pre-School, we use an online learning journey to document your child’s process. ParentZone allows us to share a child’s journey from home to Pre-School. Parents and Educators can upload moments and observations of children’s learning and interests. This is managed sensitively to ensure Educator’s main focus is the children.

Children’s art work is displayed where and when they choose, we avoid themes and control of the art displays as we value the process to creation over the end product. Some children are prolific artists on paper, whilst others display an artistic tendency in dramatic play, storytelling or construction.

Each child also has a paper record of their ‘helicopter’ stories that is sent home at the end of their time in the setting. This provides an insight to the children’s thought process, experiences and vocabulary throughout their time here.

Theory in Practice

The team use a range of theorists to construct the curriculum and philosophy of the Pre-School. Click below for a detailed list of theorists who have informed the different areas of our practice. We take a little from many different people to create our own practice and theories on child learning.

More recently we have engaged with ‘new’ experts in the field to continue developing. These have included Anna Ephgrave’s planning in the moment, Elizabeth Jarmin’s Communication Friendly Spaces, Trisha Lee’s story scribing method and the Curiosity Approach.

Theorists