A New Learning Experience

Stephen Timms, Member of Parliament for East Ham and Minister for School Standards, attended the launch of Discover's second schools outreach programme last Friday, January 11^th, at St Stephen's Nursery in East Ham. Discover is the new hands-on learning experience for children aged 2 to 7, which is due to open in Stratford High Street this October.

For the last year Discover has been operating an outreach programme, called Space to Imagine, working with Key Stage 1 pupils (5-7 year olds) in schools across six Borough's in East London. So far, over 5,300 children have benefited from these sessions. The second outreach programme is aimed at nursery aged children, and helps them to develop their imaginations as well as their language and role-playing skills. Working with two of Discover's "story-builders", a class of children have the chance to decide the plot, setting and characters for their own story, which teachers can then pick up on after the visit.

Also present at the launch with Mr Timms were the Mayor and Lady Mayor of Newham, and a number of Discover's Trustees. Those present were able to sit in on a special presentation of the Space to Imagine performance, and watch a group of nursery children interacting with the story-builders.

Speaking at the launch Mr Timms said "It is important that we recognise the role of creativity as a key element of children's learning and development. While we rightly emphasise numeracy and literacy skills we must be careful not to neglect the creative skills that enable children to work things out for themselves, and develop their own ideas".