What a year! I think we can honestly all say we did not expect us to have the year that we have had however we have made it through and got to the end of term!
All of us here would like to send a big thank you to all of you for helping us navigate our way through this very unsettling time. Your support has been invaluable to us and enabled us to follow all the restrictions and protocols to manage to keep Stepping Stones open. We are so proud of the resilience and enthusiasm the staff, children and parents have shown.
Despite the pandemic we have still managed to have a wonderful time with the children. Some of highlights have been Gill Evans visiting us to do Noah’s Story box and getting all the children and staff together singing ‘the animals went in 2 by 2’, the Easter bunny coming to visit the children, Tracey and Amanda performing their Irish dancing, the staff and children dressing up for World Book Day and the most fabulous science week filled with fun experiments. It was also lovely for the children to receive the knitted bunny rabbits from Gill and Sandra for Easter. Coolpsorts, La Jolie Ronde French and Yoga have all lifted our spirits each week allowing the children to have fun and learn new skills. Thank you to Neil, Kate and Bea for continuing to visit us each week.
Once again, our thanks go to our committee. As you will know the committee support the staff team and volunteer their time to us. Thank you from us all.
Caroline and Wendy Glenn left Stepping Stones this year. Caroline returned to her old nursery closer to home and Wendy has become a Teaching assistant at Claverdon school. We wish them both well in the future employment. With their departure we were recruiting again but we were delighted Felicity accepted a full time position with us in November and more recently Jane has joined us in June.
We will be sad to see our preschoolers leave us but are excited for them to take their next steps onto their new schools. Looking back through the children’s learning journals has been wonderful, seeing how much they have grown since being with us has been quite emotional for us. We wish them all the best in September.
We are all looking forward to welcoming back our existing children and getting to know many more new faces too. We really hope our return in September can be met with the opportunity to welcome back our preschooler visit to Hill Close Gardens and our visits to Woodland Tales down at Claverdon School.
We would like to wish you all a wonderful Summer and hope that you can all relax and enjoy the time with your friends and family.
Lots of love from the Stepping Stones team.