A bee at the Honeycomb

The Honeycomb Hub: a hive of activity nurturing the community, a place where everyone is welcome and no-one feels alone. As a family centre, we can be a point of contact to find information regarding all aspects of family life, a place where you can bond with your child through different play opportunities or simply a place to have a cold drink and a moment of peace while your children play. The name The Honeycomb Hub came about by chance. We wanted a friendly sounding name for the family centre that implied a community and somewhere people could drop in to. Having a healthy admiration for bees and their community within the hive, the name just seemed to appear one day and was perfect. We may take the theme a little far as you look around the hub with Honeybees session, Worker bees homework club, the honeypot nursery, Rugbees …. we shall soon find out if you can have too much of a good thing! The Hub: our seating area with seats for babies too and alongside our play a...

As a teacher, I believe school is incredibly important. Not just for learning the curriculum but for the whole host of other social and independent skills children learn so by default, the more children go to school, the more they will develop. As a child / teenager I would always attend school. I would honestly go home to my mother if I missed the bus and even on snow-filled days somehow make it into school to classes of half empty seats. Even in my 11 years as a teacher I never missed a day except for a couple of days sick leave.  (Sadly a downside to teaching primary is you do come into contact with every single germ and bug, though Murphy’s Law states that the majority of illness should hit teachers on the first day of the school holidays!) I must confess that there were some Sunday evenings when the Monday morning blues would commence early and I would make grand plans for how else I could spend a day – but then being a grown up would kick in again and with the arrival of the...

My sisters and I have sometimes discussed the idea of having a soundtrack to our lives. It was started by our dog Barley, sadly passed away now, but he was a most loving dog with a gentle temperament and not a clue about most things! We used to laugh whenever he came into the kitchen as he had a slight uneasiness about one patch of the floor and so would get to the kitchen door, turn backwards, reverse over said difficult patch of floor before spinning back round and continuing on his merry way. Unless food had been mentioned (of course, he was a Labrador); then being in a particular hurry, he would forget that he was supposed to be scared of the floor and dash straight over it. His soundtrack would have been some ditzy elevator music, nothing deep and meaningful and certainly no heavy beat or clashing chords. A rather empty house  At the moment I feel as though the soundtrack to my life is ‘Push The Button – Galvanise’ by the Chemical Brothers: https://www.youtube....

A mother walks into the shopping mall and her 2 children were running metres ahead of her. Though one came back when she called, the other continued in his headlong dash, checking back with a cheeky grin and then disappearing into the nearest shop. On realising it was the wrong one he dashed out again at which point his mother had caught up with him and held his hand lovingly in a fist of iron (seriously, handcuff makers could learn from a mother’s grip!). Children more under control they start the rounds of the supermarket, the children calmer only briefly wondering off to toys and only the occasional item having to be removed from the trolley that is being carefully pushed by the elder child. The cakes were perused and a delicious looking chocolate cake was reverently deposited on the top of the trolley concisely labelled “BAK CAK SPECIAL OCCAS”. On to the dairy aisle which unfortunately is located near the small selection of outdoor toys and little one had to be brought bac...