Configur Academy - Summer Term, Week 13

Dear Parents,

This is Orgesa from Configur Academy. The summer term is done, and what a way to finish it, with the children's presentations on Monday and our last in-person Young Founders session on Thursday. Tonight's letter carries the summer plans, the market news I have been sitting on, and a promise I have been wanting to make to you for a while now, so please do read to the end. I will start, as always, with Young Founders House.

For our last session of the term, the young founders turned marketers. Each team wrote, acted, and filmed a video advert of their own, and it was the most fun we have had in that room all term. The imagination on show, the little performances, the way they used whatever props they could get their hands on, some of it had me laughing out loud, and they were working out something sellers spend years learning, how to win a stranger over in a few short seconds. They will be putting that to very good use soon enough, because September is coming, and the market with it.

The summer lessons on Zoom

The club now carries on through the summer: 5 online lessons on Zoom, Thursdays from 5:30 to 6:30 pm. I will send the Zoom link in our WhatsApp group and to your email before each lesson. Here is the full plan again, for anyone who missed it last week.

Thursday 23 July - Spend and Save. We start with the tricks built to take their money, 99p endings, loot boxes, free games that are not free: I put 5 real offers on the screen, and their job is to shout the trick. Then the waiting game, £1 now or £1.50 in September, and every child leaves with a savings goal written down for the summer.

Thursday 30 July - Give. The week they learn to use their Give jar well, starting with the only question a charity needs: if I give you £1, what happens to it. Each child gets 10 seconds to sell the room on a real local cause, the room votes, and the Give Pot is handed over in person at the September market.

Thursday 6 August - Invest. Their first business ran on a loan from you; this time, each child works out whether their own Invest jar covers their materials for the September market. Investing, felt rather than explained: money goes out so that more comes back.

Thursday 13 August - Buy for £2, Sell for £5. Where cheap things that sell for more actually hide, charity shops, car boots, multipacks split into singles. I hold up an item, they guess its value, we check what it really sold for on eBay, and the closest guess wins, postage and fees in the sums.

Thursday 20 August - The Online Stall. A walk around where things actually sell, eBay, Aliexpress, Vinted, Etsy, Facebook Marketplace, and the 5-second photo test, the same object photographed well and badly. Then every child writes a listing title for a mystery item, and the room picks the one they would click.

The children are then off from 21 August, with everything pointed at the market on Sunday 13 September. And a note for your peace of mind: all the browsing in these lessons happens on my screen, the children never open accounts or selling sites themselves, and anything real runs through you.

The Young Founders Market

And now for the news I have been longing to share. Our Harvest Market on Sunday 13 September, 12:00 to 3:00 pm at The Patch, falls on the very same day, at the very same time, as Taste of Twickenham, the big food festival that takes over the whole town centre.

The last one brought 14,000 people into Twickenham. So while our young founders are standing at their stalls, the streets around them will be full, and the town will be out in force. I could not have planned it better if I had tried.

We are working with The Patch on some extra entertainment of our own too, live music and a few surprises I will keep for nearer the time, and our summer lessons will be spent getting the stalls ready for what should be the biggest market day we have ever had.

More details on each market’s theme and descriptions can be found here: https://configuracademy.com/young-founders-market/

And then there was Monday night. I want to start by saying thank you, properly, to every one of you who came, because looking up and seeing your faces is a big part of what made the evening what it was, and it meant a great deal to me, and even more to the children.

We worked towards this all term, and they delivered. The presentations were entirely their own, and I loved the range of them: AI, space and asteroids, animals that people get wrong, favourite places, pointless inventions, rules they would change, and what school gets right and what it gets wrong, among plenty of others. A few of the children were nervous beforehand; they told me so themselves, and they stood up and did it anyway, and enjoyed themselves up there, which is the thing I care about most of all. I am very proud of every single one of them. 😊

Next term, we go further. Alongside presenting, the children will be getting stuck into debating, interviewing, and making a podcast of their own, with deeper and more interesting questions to explore, all of it building towards standing up in front of you again in December.

And one more thing. We will be holding our very first public speaking competition, open to all the children in the club and to children from across the borough and beyond. More on that in the weeks to come, I promise, so do watch this space.

The response to the 2 new clubs, The Detective Club and Configur AI Junior, has been lovely to see, and I want to thank you for it. I do feel blessed with the community we have around these clubs, and I promise to keep earning it.

If you have not yet told me your child's plans for September, please do send them over. From tomorrow, Monday 20 July, I will start offering the remaining places to the waiting list, and as ever, if you need a little more time to arrange things, just say, and I will hold your child's place for as long as you need. 😊

The Detective Club - Critical Thinking, Reasoning and Problem Solving

Mondays, 5:30 to 6:30 pm at The Patch, from September.

This club builds those skills the only way children actually take them in: by having fun. Every Monday there's a sealed case file on the table, and the children work in teams to crack it. Evidence to weigh, a witness to cross-question, numbers to work through, a verdict to defend out loud. An hour of proper reasoning and problem solving every week. Ask the children, and they'll tell you they solve mysteries. 😊

You can read more here: https://configuracademy.com/the-detective-club/

Configur AI Junior - AI Literacy, Ethics and Judgement

Thursdays, 5:30 to 6:30 pm at The Patch, from September.

Every week, a parent tells me 2 things in the same conversation. They don't want their child left unprepared for AI, and they worry about what growing up with it will do to their child's development. I hear you. I'm a parent too, and that is exactly why this club exists.

Here, children learn what AI really is: a machine that does not think, know, understand, or feel, and is never a friend. They learn how it manipulates and how to catch it doing so. How to tell AI-made from real. How to build with it, when it is genuinely useful, and how it can sharpen their work and their thinking. And, most importantly, when to put it away and use their own brain, because that is the muscle these years exist to build.

You can read more here: https://configuracademy.com/configur-ai-junior/

For children doing both Monday clubs, Rise to Lead and The Detective Club, and both Thursday clubs, Young Founders House and Configur AI Junior, I will provide a light dinner of sandwiches, fruit, and drinks from 5:00 to 5:30, so your child stays with me for the whole afternoon and you collect them once, at 6:30 pm.

And for the children I collect from school, Mondays and Thursdays will look like this: pick up from school at 3:15 to 3:30, walk to The Patch, snack from 3:45 to 4:00, Rise to Lead/YFH from 4:00 to 5:00, dinner from 5:00 to 5:30, The Detective Club/Configur AI Junior from 5:30 to 6:30, and collection from The Patch at 6:30 pm.

Now for the biggest news of the night. I am building holiday clubs. Proper full days in the school holidays, where children will be far too busy having fun to notice quite how much they are learning. Everything I am on a mission to build in children this age, every soft skill, will go into the holiday clubs. I will be honest with you, it is a big job, and I want to do it properly, but I am aiming for the first one as soon as possible.

So here is the promise, and it belongs to my current families and to anyone who joins us from the waiting list by Monday, 31 August 2026. First, a quick reminder of how the membership works: it is simply the cost of the year's clubs divided into manageable monthly payments, and you can cancel at any time with 30 days' notice. Now the promise itself:

I will announce the holiday club dates as soon as the plans are finalised, and you can then pick whichever days suit your family. The free days stay with your child for as long as they are part of our clubs; they cannot, I am afraid, be used once your child is no longer with us.

Young Founders House on Zoom

September places

The new clubs

Young Founders Market

Check our new website here: https://configuracademy.com/

That is everything from this week. As always, if you have a question about either programme or if there is anything you would like to talk through, you can reply to this email or message me directly on 07414 962803.

If you have missed any of our previous newsletters, you can catch up on them all here:
https://newsletter.configuracademy.com/

Have a lovely week.

Orgesa
Founder,
Configur Academy
Wesbite: www.configuracademy.com
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