The young ones

Our Thursday afternoon group has largely younger children in it, Our main aim with these children at the moment is to provide them with a safe and happy second home.We try to provide them with a wide variety of activities to stimulate their interest and amongst these activities we try to provide a tactile activity.

The pictures today show children playing with the dolls houses. These children were lost in their small world play for most of half an hour.Another picture shows a new little boy enjoying constructing with the Popoids.

The last couple of pictures show todays activity in the hall . The children had the balancing beams out which they talked about as being bridges over the water. Some of the children extended the activity by getting the chalk and drawing stepping stones in the water to keep them safe from the sharks and the crocs. They also drew these creatures amongst the stepping stones. It may look like we are encouraging graffitti but in actual fact drawing on this scale helps develop the correct muscles ready for when the children take the first steps to writing.

Rising Fives and the Police Lady

Today at Rising Fives we had a visit from a police lady. She came to tell us how the police are there to help us. We all loved looking at her uniform and her handcuffs. She brought in some real police hats for us to try on and we also tried on her uniform. Later she took all our finger prints .Some of us got a little carried away when we were doing this.

It was a very exciting afternoon!

Lentils and Scarfs

Today at preschool we had a tray of lentils out for the children to explore

Many of the children were occupied for most of our free play time pouring filling and emptying-----often all over the place.There was as many children busy sweeping up the spilt lentils as there were playing with them!

Later we went outside to throw our colourful scarfs about in the wind to test how windy it was today, in connection with our weather theme..

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Calculating numbers

This term we are trying to encourage our children to begin basic calculating of numbers .

Lindsey is here getting one of our older boys to repeatedly throw our special dice which only has numbers up to four.

This clever girl with such lovely red boots on , managed to go up the ladder the correct number of rungs and was being encouraged to predict what number she should get to.

Measuring the rainfall

This terms theme is called Drippys adventures and it is all about our weather.

Drippy is a raindrop who is blown on his cloud across the sea to the mountains . Our first weeks work was therefore on the wind .

The cloud cools and Drippy falls as rain.

Here you can see three of our preschool children looking at our rain gauge . On our first day it filled five sections of our container---very impressive!