Newbury Hall Children’s Centre is a hub that can be accessed by all Redbridge residents, who is a parent or a carer for a child aged 0-5 years. We offer free universal and targeted sessions to residents mainly based in the north area of London Borough of Redbridge. Some of the sessions that we offer to residents are Busy Babies, Baby Massage, Busy Toddlers, Chatter Matters, Book start programme and Creche.
Through these sessions Early Years Practitioners and Family Support Workers play with children and role model to parents in how to play with their children.
Currently our outdoor resources are limited and those resources we have are either plastic or lack the power of inspiring playfulness to children, parents, and carers. Our vision is to inspire creativity in our children, parents, and carers. Also to add not all parents and carers are able to pay for outdoor play activities for their children to enjoy, learn and develop. We hope by accessing the fund we can bring play closer to home in the community without charging our families and carers.
Through accessing the fund, we intend to update our role play area in our outdoor space at Newbury Hall CC. A big chunk of the money would be used to purchase a Playhouse. We would use the money to paint the playhouse, including creating a decking outside the playhouse, purchase resources to complete the playhouse i.e., bells, door mat, baskets.
This Playhouse would mainly be explored by toddlers in the sessions that I have mentioned earlier. Through creating a natural playhouse, we intend to extend our toddlers learning and provide opportunities for toddlers to play together when families attend the session. Pre-Covid we would have up to 20 families accessing our sessions. Due to Covid we have limited to only allowing 12 families in accessing our services. This playhouse will be transferred into a café, school, hospital, where learning through play can be possible. We hope this role play area would support toddler's social, emotional, personal development. Also it would give toddlers opportunities for them to develop their Fine Motor skills. Our biggest need that we tackle is supporting children's communication and langue development. Again, by creating this role play area we hope to introduce our toddlers new vocabulary and set an example to parents. With the remaining funding we hope to update our mud kitchen at Newbury Hall Children’s Centre. We will be focusing on our role play areas as a lot of our children take an interest in those areas and we hope to extend that learning further.
We look forward to hearing from you soon.