Today we ventured down to the East Sussex, a near 2 hour drive from Enfield to go and visit the team at Community Playthings.

Community Playthings design and make high quality children’s wooden furniture and play resources and have been doing so now for over 50 years. All the resources are made from locally grown and sourced birch wood. Each segment is cut by hand in the community’s wood shop and hand crafted for outstanding durability.

They are thriving community who have several bases around the work from Australia to Paraguay. There is a very close knit family feel at their Darvell community in East Sussex where everyone works, learns, eats and socialises together and the team there made us feel most welcome. It was great to feel the warmth within the surroundings and that is exactly what we want to bring to the Monkey Puzzle Enfield setting!

The team have extensive knowledge of room set ups to encourage the best learning and nurturing environments for under 5’s and having taken a look at our floor plans they have already provided us with some guidance to how to make the best use of our nursery space. They also have an extensive training catalogue on how their equipment ties in with EYFS learning requirements which they were happy to share with us.

Each Community Playthings play item is designed to support open-ended play, making sure a child’s imagination is never limited by what they play with. Detail is minimal to ensure that children’s ideas and imaginations can freely guide their play. The simpler the plaything, the more versatile it is and the more natural the resource, the better children learn.

For example a simple wooden building block could be a means of construction or it could be an item of food, a phone or a truck.

They provide both indoor and outdoor resources and we will be working closely with them over the coming months to fit out the nursery.