The Snehsammelan is the largest thing we do all year, and the only evening when the whole
school — children, parents, teachers — is in one room at the same time. Our most
recent one, Tiny Steps to Adventure, was held on Tuesday 10 March.

Every child is on the stage

Not the confident ones. Not the ones who can already dance. Every child takes part, in a
dance, a song or a skit, and every child is on that stage at some point in the evening. This
is the whole design of it: a programme built around the children who are good at performing
would leave out the ones the evening is actually for.

There are costumes, which are a large part of the appeal, and a prize distribution at the end,
and a short look back over the year.

What standing on a stage actually does

It looks like entertainment and it is doing something fairly serious. A three- or four-year-old
walking onto a lit stage in front of a room of adults is managing several hard things at once:

• Performing a sequence from memory — weeks of rehearsal recalled under
  pressure, which is working memory doing real work
• Moving together — staying with the group rather than at your own pace
• Waiting — in the wings, in costume, for a cue that takes ages to come
• Being looked at — and finding out that it is survivable

That last one is the point. Stage fright met at four, with a teacher three feet away and a
parent clapping in the second row, is a much smaller thing than stage fright met at fourteen.

For parents, it is the year made visible

Most of what happens at a pre-school is invisible to parents. You hand over a child in the
morning and get back a tired one at lunchtime, and the progress in between arrives as reports
and anecdotes. The Snehsammelan is the one evening you see it directly — the child who
cried at the gate in June, standing in a costume in March, remembering the steps.

Nobody watches the whole performance. Every parent watches one child, and looks
up only when that child is on.

Photographs

Pictures from the most recent Annual Function are in the
gallery. If you would like an image of your child taken down, for any
reason and without giving one, tell any teacher and we will remove it the same working day.