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Written by Roisin, Nominated Supervisor | Croydon
Holy Innocents Primary School Visited Dashing Ducks Croydon!
Holy Innocents Primary School Croydon is just up the road from us, and this term their Year 5 students came in to spend a morning with our preschool children.
This term, Year 5 students from Holy Innocents Catholic Primary School Croydon came to spend a morning with us at Dashing Ducks. They joined us in our preschool room, sat at our tables, tried our activities, and spent a few hours with the youngest kids in our care.
We had been talking with Holy Innocents for a little while about making something like this happen. There’s something straightforward about the idea, an older-student visit to an early childhood setting, but getting it right takes coordination on both sides. Timetabling, permissions, the right group size, enough structure for it to feel purposeful without being overly directed. When it finally came together, the morning turned out better than we’d planned for.
Our children were watching the Year 5s from the moment they walked through the door. By the time they’d settled in, the preschoolers were already pulling up next to them.
A Morning with Year 5
The Year 5s moved into the room with a lot of energy, which our preschoolers immediately matched. They picked up materials, sat down next to kids they’d never met, and just got on with it. Honestly, that’s harder than it sounds when you’re ten and you’ve never been in a room full of three and four-year-olds before.
What played out over the morning was largely organic. Some of the Year 5s gravitated toward the art table and ended up deep in a collaborative project with a few of our preschoolers, working through who holds what, who picks the colours, and what the thing they’re making is actually supposed to be. Others ended up in the reading corner, which surprised us. Our kids don’t always choose that space on their own, but with an older child sitting there it became one of the most popular spots in the room for the rest of the morning.
There were moments of real patience from the Year 5 students: explaining things slowly, waiting while small hands worked through something tricky, adjusting without being asked. Our educators noticed it and talked about it afterwards. It’s not something you can plan for or teach in a classroom lesson.
What Our Children Experienced
Having older kids in the room shifted the dynamic in a way that’s difficult to replicate within a same-age peer group. Our children weren’t just playing. They were watching closely, copying, and attempting things they wouldn’t usually try. A few of the quieter ones had more to say that morning than usual.
Some specifics stood out. One of our children who rarely approaches new adults walked straight up to a Year 5 student and asked to join what they were doing. Another child spent thirty minutes on an activity at the art table they’d given up on every time we’d offered it before. This time there was someone older sitting next to them, working through the same thing, and that made the difference.
Part of what makes this particular age gap work well is that the Year 5 students were old enough to be genuinely interesting and capable to watch, but not so removed from early childhood that our kids found them intimidating. Our preschoolers were curious rather than cautious. That’s a genuinely useful place for young children to be.
Why These Connections Matter
Visits like this one sit at the intersection of a few things we genuinely care about in early childhood education.
School readiness. Being ready for school is about more than knowing letters and numbers. A big part of it is having some lived experience with unfamiliar adults and children, understanding how to manage in a group you haven’t chosen, and having a real-world model of what older kids and school life actually look like. Talking to children about school helps. But seeing a Year 5 student from a local school sitting next to you, doing the same activity and asking you what colour you want, is a different kind of preparation entirely. Our children who’ll be starting Kindergarten in the next year or two got something from this morning that we couldn’t have given them any other way.
Social development. In a typical day at Dashing Ducks, our kids are with the same familiar peers and the same educators they know well. That’s important for security and routine. But school life asks children to be socially flexible: to read new people quickly, to join a group they haven’t chosen, to ask for help from someone they’ve never spoken to before. This visit gave our preschoolers a genuine, unscripted opportunity to practise all of that. Moving around the room with unfamiliar older kids, working out the social dynamics in real time, navigating who gets which materials. These are exactly the social muscles that early childhood education is trying to build, and having an authentic reason to use them makes a real difference.
Language development. We noticed how much our children talked throughout the morning. Language in early childhood grows through social motivation: children stretch their vocabulary and sentence structure when they’re genuinely engaged and trying to communicate something that matters to them. The Year 5 students gave our kids a new audience, new topics, and a real reason to push their words further. We heard children forming sentences and asking questions that were new for them, in a context that felt completely natural.
Community connection and the Kindergarten transition. Many of our Croydon families are already thinking about the transition to school. It comes up in conversations all the time, and a lot of our children will end up at Holy Innocents when they reach school age. Having that relationship exist in a real, visible way, something the children have actually experienced rather than just heard about, makes the transition feel less like stepping into the unknown.
If your family is considering Holy Innocents for your child, you can find out more and start the process on their enrolment page, or get in touch with the school directly. They also run a High 5 Transition to Kindergarten program specifically designed to help families prepare for the move to school, worth looking into if your child is getting close to that stage.
A Thank You to Holy Innocents Primary School Croydon
A genuine thank you to the Year 5 students who gave up a morning to spend time with our youngest kids. They were patient, good-humoured, and natural with the little ones in a way that says something real about the community Holy Innocents Catholic Primary School Croydon has built. And to the staff who made the visit happen, this kind of collaboration takes coordination and goodwill on both sides, and we’re glad we made it work.
We’d love to have them back, and we hope this is the beginning of an ongoing relationship between our two schools.
School visits like this one happen at the childcare Castle Hill centre too, where local primary schools drop in each year.
Thanks again to the staff at Holy Innocents Primary School Croydon for making the visit happen. Transition to school is a big part of what we do, and you can read more about it in our Croydon preschool program.
Come and Visit Us at Dashing Ducks Croydon
If you’re looking for childcare in Croydon where community, learning and care go together, we’d love to meet you. Our centre is open Monday to Friday and we welcome families to come in and see the space for themselves.
You can read what Croydon families have said on our testimonials page, or get in touch directly to arrange a tour.
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