Welcome to The Children of One End Street, like all things it has a story. I have a love of children, children’s books, creativity, community and countryside. I have a Bachelor of Education in Mathematics and Science and during this time came across Chaos Theory and Group Theory. Following a period of teaching, I decided to study garden design and I developed a number of gardens in schools. I had not come across a kindergarten until a visit to Denmark to visit a plant nursery on the same site as a kindergarten where the emphasis was on the outdoors and growing and preparing food with the children, something I had done as a child with my grandfather and father. The kindergarten has a mixed age range and like tending young seedlings to flower or fruit, we tend the child. The chaos of being a three year old led by a will to do, to the order of a six year old who might want to fall over but chooses to stand straight and true. In their last year of kindergarten the oldest children are an example for the younger child. The children move from an awareness of what they need to also what others need. If you walk past The Children of One End Street you will see the influence of all that I have done.
If you had time to hear the whole story, it would start with buying a print of the alphabet by a friend and local artist, which needed a wall to be hung on. As is often the case, at that time I imagined this would be in a shop selling natural toys, clothing and craft for children with a pup sitting under the shop counter. The first chapter on ‘The puppy Leonard comes home’, the boy pup was actually a girl, now fondly called Lenny. The striving for a shop brought me, as life often does to the very place The Children of One End Street is 1 Gloucester Street. We are in the middle of town next to a very good café, Star Anise Arts Café and we are not a shop but a kindergarten where we play shop and make a counter and where you can buy the very things we love to use in the kindergarten. It is a one-of-a-kind shopping experience we can provide affordable but good quality toys and craft for children, we also sell a range of knitted clothes for babies, head to toe, Patapon has a lamb, our own knitting range. Our final chapter, Further adventures of One End Street, would be to reprint classic children’s books now out of print illustrated by the very artist at the beginning of this story.
Ofsted Inspection September 2021
The quality and standards of the early years provision is good.
