On our morning walk around Crowland today, the children spotted several buses. They were very excited and would call out "big bus!" We asked the children whether they had been on a bus before a few of them said no, so we thought what a perfect opportunity to share an new experience.

We waited at the bus stop, bought a return ticket to Spalding and got seated all together at the back of the bus. Throughout our trip we explained to the children what we were doing and making an every day event as fun as possible. We sang "The wheels on the bus" and counted each time we saw a tractor working in the field. We talked about all the different colours we could see and even talked about what we could smell. Once we reached the city centre some of the children told us "petrol" when we drove passed the petrol station and "shopping" when we saw the supermarkets and people with their trolleys. At the end of our route, they pushed the button to tell the driver to stop for us and all the children were...

Our theme for this term was originally woodland animals however it became apparent that some of our little ones needed a some support learning their colours. With this in mind we changed our theme to Weather with our first sub-theme being rainbows! This gave us the opportunity to plan lots of exciting activities centered around colour recognition! 

We have been making rainbow catchers, going on colour hunts, reading rainbow stories and extending our learning with related craft activities, cutting and gluing, making our own rainbow clouds, science experiments and so much more!

This morning we painted our hands with rainbow stripes and printed a beautiful picture. Whilst we did our artwork we sang "I can sing a rainbow" and talked about each different colour we were using. They really enjoyed how the paintbrush tickled their hand and seeing the affect of their own hand print. We followed our craft session with a morning walk. On our walk we played the hopping game. As our colour of the week is blue, the children hopped every time we saw the colour blue!

We had a wonderful time making our own rainbow catchers. This exercise practiced fine motor skills as the children were required to thread their multi coloured ribbon through the small holes in the bottle and peel their own stickers.

We took our rainbow catchers to the field and ran around with them! We watched the ribbons blowing and spoke about the affects of wind. They extremely enjoyed this activity and the ribbons tickling their little faces, just lovely!

All week we have been discovering rainbows! We have talked about where rainbows come from with the help of "What Makes a Rainbow" story book. The children began to understand that you need rain and sunshine to create a rainbow so we ended the week with a mini science experiment. The little ones sat fascinated as we transformed 6 jars of water by adding different shades of food colouring. We took them outside and let the sun shine through them creating our very own rainbow!! 

This morning we introduced conkers to the preschool children. They were extremely inquisitive about the spikey, rough texture of the shell in comparison to the smooth texture of the conker inside. Opening the conkers practiced fine motor skills and was an exciting experience for the little ones. What was your first memory of conkers? Such a nostalgic piece of nature

Our daily fine motor skill exercises are designed to increase the dexterity and skill of the children's tripod fingers, with the hope of ultimately improving their pencil control and handwriting.

Today we worked on forming different finger positions and practicing the arch in our hand needed for writing. We make this activity fun by giving each finger exercise a name such as "the spider" and asking the spider to crawl etc. 

Give it a try at home!