1Good afternoon.
2My name's Mrs Carter
3and I run the before and after school extended hours childcare service.
4I hope you've had a chance to have a good look around the school and talk to staff and pupils.
5I know that many of you are interested in using our childcare service
6when your child joins the school,
7and perhaps you already know something about it,
8but for those that don't, I'll go through the main details now.
9We offer childcare for children from the ages of four to eleven
10both before and after school.
11I know that many parents who work find this service invaluable.
12You can leave your child with us safe in the knowledge that they will be extremely well cared for.
13We are insured to provide care for up to 70 children,
14although we rarely have this many attending at any one session.
15I think we generally expect around 50 to 60 children for the afternoon sessions
16and about half that number for the breakfast sessions.
17Although we currently do have 70 children registered with us,
18not all of these attend every day.
19It's ten years since we began offering an extended hours service
20and we've come a long way during that time.
21When we first opened, we only had about 20 children attending regularly.
22We try to keep our costs as low as we can
23and we think we provide very good value for money.
24For the afternoon sessions, which run from 3:30 until 6 p.m.,
25it's £7.20.
26But if you prefer, you can pay for one hour only,
27which costs £3.50
28or two hours which costs £5.70.
29The cost of the childcare includes food and snacks.
30They'll be given breakfast in the morning
31and in the afternoon, a healthy snack as soon as they finish school.
32At 5 p.m. children are given something more substantial,
33such as pasta or a casserole.
34Please inform us of any allergies that your child might have
35and we'll make sure they're offered a suitable alternative.
36As you may know,
37the childcare service runs through the school holidays from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.
38We offer a really varied and exciting programme to keep the children entertained,
39we don't want them to feel as if they are still at school!
40It will also feel different
41because they'll get the chance to make new friends with children from other schools.
42Spaces are available for them
43because a lot of our term-time children don't always attend during the holiday.
44In the past,
45parents have asked if children over the age of 11 are allowed to come with their younger brothers and sisters,
46but I'm afraid we're unable to do this
47because of the type of insurance we have.
48So now let me tell you about some of the activities that your child can do during the after-school sessions.
49As well as being able to use the playground equipment, computers and the library,
50there is usually at least one 'special' activity that children can do each day.
51For example, Spanish.
52We have a specialist teacher coming in every Thursday
53to give a basic introduction to the language through games and songs.
54She does two sessions:
55one for the over 8s and one for the younger children.
56This is the only activity which we have to make an extra charge for
57but it's well worth it.
58Once a week the children have the opportunity to do some music.
59We're very lucky that one of our staff is a member of a folk band.
60On Mondays, she teaches singing and percussion to groups of children.
61We do rely on parental support for this,
62so if any of you sing or play an instrument
63and would be prepared to help out at these sessions, we'd be delighted.
64Painting continues to be one of the most popular activities.
65To begin with we weren't keen on offering this because of the extra mess involved,
66but children kept asking if they could do some art
67and so we finally gave in.
68Art is great for helping the children to relax after working hard at school all day.
69Yoga is something that we've been meaning to introduce for some time
70but haven't been able to find anyone available to teach it,
71until now that is.
72So we'll see how this goes.
73Hopefully, children will benefit in all sorts of ways from this.
74Cooking is another popular activity.
75They make a different sort of cake, or pizza or bread each week.
76Although the younger children love doing it,
77we found that the mess was just too much,
78so we've decided to restrict this to the over 8s,
79as they are better able to clean up after themselves.