Our design team had just developed a product to enhance Communication and Personal, Social, Emotional Development before the revised EYFS raised these areas of learning to prime area status. Early Education’s new document, Development Matters in the Early Years Foundation Stage, suggests “Create areas in which children can sit and chat with friends, such as a snug den and cosy spaces”. That’s exactly what we were after!

Obviously, children need to feel at home before they have confidence to develop relationships and communicate. We had pondered this for some time and dreamed of  designing intimate cosy spaces where children would feel secure, relaxed and in control. The only question was “How?” After wrestling with this for several months we came up with a new line of little arches and lovely bamboo panels that can be combined in various ways to create child-size hidey-holes. These arches, curves and wave panels are compatible with Roomscapes so you can design your own nooks by building onto furniture you already have. You can also choose from an array of ready-made Cosy spaces.

Wouldn’t you have loved that kind of space as a child?

P.S. It’s not just children that love them – nurseries tell us parents respond positively to their children having a “place of their own”.

In 2011 we discontinued the Community Playthings cots and rest mats so that we could re-design them. We thought nursery owners could source them from other manufacturers while we finished off some other designs first.

However, we seem to have been wrong: Although you could source these products elsewhere, they did not have the quality you wanted. Rest mats would crack and split. Cots were wobbly and took too much space. So many of you made your voices heard that we are taking action: By the end of the summer (2012) we plan to make both rest mats and cots available once more. That gives us the time to do all the testing needed before a product, especially one for the youngest children, is released.

And, following the reintroduction of cots and rest mats, there is going to be something new:

Over the last three months, our design team has made numerous field visits to hear the sector’s ideas and wishes around children’s sleep. We learned that many of you like to take children out of cots once they are mobile – and yet you are unhappy laying a nine- or twelve-month-old baby to sleep on a mat on the floor. So we have put a lot of time and thought into a brand-new sleep product for these young children. I’m not going to describe it and I don’t know when it will be ready, so please be patient. You’re going to love it!

If you want to know when the cots and rest mats are in production send us an email with your name and phone number. We’ll make sure you’ll be the first to hear.

Over the last years hundreds of customers have visited us in East Sussex. One of the highlights of the factory tour was seeing where the small wooden lorries are built. For many years this was George’s domain. On the first of March last year, hundreds of friends and children celebrated his 99th birthday. George faithfully continued making lorries until he was nearly 100.

George had no family, having outlived them all by years, so my husband Toby and I with our two-year-old son Chase took “Grandpa” into our family. George married late in life and had no children of his own. Nevertheless he loved children and carefully making perfect lorries was his contribution to their happy childhoods.

Last November, 100 days before his 100th birthday, George passed away peacefully. Our whole community misses George; we were his family and he was our Grandpa. If your school or nursery has a Community Playthings lorry, aeroplane or helicopter, then George has touched your setting as well.

I have known Sally Eaton and the work of The Childcare Company for many years. We worked as a team creating an “Enabling environments” area for an early years exhibit in 2009. Last year Sally approached Community Playthings with two new projects, but the best would be if I let her tell about them:

“Having spent many years training nursery practitioners to create stimulating, high quality learning environments, I wanted to ensure that our new nursery in Langley provided children with a safe and exciting place to play. I asked Community Playthings to advise me on planning the rooms and furniture so that it would enhance the learning activities we do with the children. I spent a whole afternoon at Robertsbridge and benefited greatly from their expertise and ideas. The model room was inspirational and allowed me to see first-hand how rooms could be divided to make cosy spaces. The Community Playthings planning team had endless patience and allowed me to try out various plans until we settled on the one that was best. The whole process from beginning to end was a pleasure and I am delighted with what we have created. Parents and visitors are highly complimentary and the whole nursery certainly has the wow factor!

“When we opened the nursery in September 2011 the children settled quickly. I am sure the warm homely environment that Community Playthings helped me to create contributed significantly to this process. We have now equipped Langley Hall Primary Academy, (our new Free School) reception classes with Community Playthings equipment and furniture also, so as the children move from the nursery to the school they will experience that continuity of approach.”

Sally Eaton, Education Director for Wellingtons/Langley Hall

Everyone understands that automobile design is a complex process with teams working for years to perfect each part. However I often get raised eyebrows when I tell people that it took three people two months to design our Pushcart. After all, it’s got four wheels and a handle. A week to design they would guess. Why two months?

Early years catalogues are full of little pink prams, plastic wheelbarrows, baby walkers and wagons. Each serves a specific function and not much else. Our challenge was to create one piece of equipment that would serve children from one-year-olds taking their first steps to rambunctious three-year-olds moving a pile of blocks from the construction corner to the role play area.

I will only touch on one aspect of the design.The Pushcart does not have swivelling castors at the front to make it easy to steer like a shopping cart. That might work for a two- or three-year-old, but when a one-year-old wants to use the Pushcart she crawls over and pulls herself up on the sides of the cart. Then her hands ‘walk’ up the handle. If there were castors on the front, the Pushcart would swivel sideways and the child would end up face-down on the floor. On the other hand, an older child needs to steer the cart. The team used anthropometric charts and observed children to figure out the balance of height and weight so that an older child could press down on the handle to steer it while the beginning walker would not tip it. The final Pushcart design looks simple, but there's much more to it than meets the eye.

I always look forward to the day when a new product is in production and it's time to photograph it for the Community Playthings catalogue. We roll out the white paper for the backdrop and make sure all of the props are ready. In the morning our photographer shows up with the lights and studio camera and we are off. Although photoshoot days are hectic, the saving grace is that we are working with children. I was a teacher before working at Community Playthings and miss my days with the children. In an area off the set we keep the children happily occupied until the lights, furniture and props are adjusted to everyone's satisfaction. Then the best part begins as we bring in the children. To avoid dusty footprints on the paper we often lift them over the lighting wires and into place. As the images come up on the screen we wait for that perfect shot. These are not models posing; they are children – alive, moving, sometimes funny – and all sorts of quirky things happen. We want to see them engrossed in their play, not smiling at the camera.

The project this time was our new child-sized rocking chair. We asked Mary to tell Dae Mun a story so we could show two children communicating while using the new rocking chairs. Well, we all got to listen to the story and Dae Mun became so interested in the story that he forgot to rock. So that's the story behind one of the hundreds of pictures that never made it into the catalogue.