Real lives: All singing, all dancing nursery teacher will be much missed

Published on Wednesday 10 June 2009 10:08

A dedicated Portobello teacher who has spent her career caring for young children is set to retire. Freda Ward, 67, is retiring after 20 years at Seabeach Nursery and almost 40 years in the profession.

Fellow teachers at the nursery have paid tribute to the much-liked colleague, described as a familiar face in Portobello.

Now living in Bruntsfield, Freda Ward has worked at the nursery since it was established in 1989.

She was born in Orkney in 1942 and attended Stromness Academy before pursuing higher education in primary teaching at Aberdeen University.

She married in 1975 but is now a widow and has a grown-up daughter.

She moved to Edinburgh when she was 22 where she taught infants for 17 years before starting as a pre-school teacher at Seabeach Nursery, just off the Portobello Promenade.

A part of the active kids day nurseries network, Seabeach works with the government initiative in promoting initiatives to tackle obesity in Scotland. With an interest in classical music, poetry and theatre, Ms Ward was a great believer in song and dance in the nursery to keep the kids fit and active.

Seabeach Nursery owner, Lisa Greenan said: "She's just absolutely magic.

"The truth is that all the children love her and if you could bottle all her energy and enthusiasm and sell it you'd be a millionaire."

Freda said her most memorable times at the nursery were concerts for the children's parents every Christmas.

She said: "Christmas is lovely. We put on concerts for the parents and those were very good because the children were as young as two years old. So that was wonderful, when they sang and danced for their parents."

With class sizes of a maximum of 25, she has remained in contact with many of the children as they have grown up in Portobello.

Mrs Greenan said: "She's very well-known in Portobello and obviously she's known a lot of the children leave here and go to local primary and local secondary and then on to university and some of the children will be coming back this week to see her."

When she retires she plans to travel to Vienna and St Petersburg – amongst other things – but she will return to the nursery.

She said: "I probably will come back and do some singing with the children but that would just be on an informal basis."

Mrs Greenan added: "We're still retaining her on a very long piece of string."