Meet Sam

Your guide to the preschool years (ages 3–5)

Sam peers around the door of his bedroom, clutching a handmade treasure map.

"I'm looking for clues," he whispers. "They're hidden. You have to find them."

This is Sam at three and a half - caught in that magical, boundary-blurring window where imagination takes flight, friendships take root, and play becomes a full-time occupation. One moment he’s a vet bandaging his toy rabbit, the next he’s Professor Zap, fixing things with a colander helmet and a cardboard toolkit.

You’ll usually find him deep in a story only he understands or halfway through an invention made from sellotape and cereal boxes. The kitchen table in his 1930s Elmwood semi is strewn with string, scissors, and scraps. The garden boasts a mud kitchen, a beanpole teepee, and at least three experimental ‘labs’ made of scrap wood and curiosity.

He lives with his parents - Rachel (a primary school teacher) and Thomas (an IT consultant) - and his six-year-old sister, Alice, who sometimes borrows his felt tips without asking.

Where Sam is now

Sam is in the heart of the preschool years - still learning through his body, his hands, his senses, but starting to organise ideas and express them through play. His drawings are turning into stories. His games have rules (sometimes). His friendships are real and (often) intense.

He is beginning to test his ideas against the world.

At home, he tapes kitchen roll tubes into stethoscopes and sorts his books by colour. At the Diana Preschool, he asks big questions:

“Why do we have eyebrows?”
“Can you turn soup back into a carrot?”
“What happens if you dig all the way through the Earth?”

Outdoors, Sam’s world stretches from The Green - where he hosts ‘important meetings’ under the cherry tree - to Walker Brook, where he builds dams with Alice and Raj.

He’s exploring:

• Connection and transformation schemas. Taping, wrapping, combining, constructing.
• Imaginative role play. Vet, explorer, engineer.
• Early literacy. Labelling, list-making, storytelling through pictures and maps.
• Emotional flexibility. Big feelings, big recoveries.

Some days he negotiates like a diplomat. Others, he cries because the stick isn’t the ‘right’ one. That’s preschool.

What’s coming up

Over the next year, you’ll follow Sam through all kinds of adventures:

• Planning for the May Fair. Dancing might be on the cards - maybe.
• Telling his first ‘written’ story. Drawn in six parts, with arrows.
• Testing his limits. Climbing the big log at Walker Brook, again and again.
• Discovering new friendships. Aisha knows everything about trains.

He’ll move from parallel play to real collaboration. From imaginary potions to labelled diagrams. From making a mess to making a plan.

And you’ll see his parents navigating the familiar tensions:

• Screens. How to avoid battles without banning them.
• School readiness. How to support early reading and writing - without rushing.
• Friendships. When to step in, and when to let her figure it out.
• Independence. How to make space for your child to become herself.

Why follow Sam?

Because you have a preschooler of your own. Or one on the way. Or because you want to understand what’s going on behind your child’s latest explorations and questions.

Because Sam shows us that play isn’t a break from learning - it is learning.

When you understand how Sam learns, you start to see your own child differently.

And because in Elmwood, we learn in stories.

Sam’s are just beginning.