Kingfishers Colden Common Preschool

Recently, the children enjoyed creating their own bead necklaces inspired by traditional West African beads. We looked at pictures of beautiful bead designs and also explored the flag of Niger together.

Daphrose and Antoine loved watching the children use their fantastic fine motor skills to carefully thread brightly coloured buttons, beads and pasta onto their necklaces. Activities like this are wonderful for developing hand-eye coordination, concentration and the finger strength needed for early writing skills.

The children also enjoyed chatting about their favourite colours and thinking about which colours the twins might like best, helping to build communication skills, confidence and cultural awareness through meaningful conversation and shared experiences. 🌍✨

🌟 Sensory Circuits at Kingfishers! 🌟

Every day at Kingfishers, we run Sensory Circuits (or as some of our little ones like to call it, the Sensory Circus 🤹‍♀️), and the impact has been truly wonderful! 💛
Sensory Circuits are a structured, short movement programme designed to help children get ready for learning by supporting their sensory and physical needs.

Through a series of activities, children engage in:
🔹 Alerting activities – to wake up the body and brain (e.g. bouncing, skipping, jumping)
🔹 Organising activities – to improve focus and coordination (e.g. balancing, throwing, catching)
🔹 Calming activities – to help settle and prepare for learning (e.g. stretching, deep pressure exercises)

We’ve seen fantastic benefits across the setting, with children improving in focus, self-regulation, confidence, and core strength. It’s also a brilliant way to support emotional well-being, helping little ones feel settled and ready for their day.
Whether it’s hopping, climbing, balancing, or stretching, our daily Sensory Circuits are making a real difference—and we love seeing the children embrace them with such enthusiasm! 🌟💪

Nothing more exciting than a huge delivery of fresh sand! The children were so excited to see the sand pit topped up and ready for lots of digging, scooping, building and imaginative play.

Sand play offers so many benefits in the Early Years. It helps to develop children’s fine motor skills and hand strength through pouring, patting, digging and using tools. It also encourages creativity, problem-solving and teamwork as children build together, create stories and explore different textures and concepts. Sand is a wonderful sensory experience too, supporting children to feel calm, engaged and curious as they learn through play.

We are incredibly lucky to have our large undercover sand pit, allowing the children to enjoy sand play whatever the weather. Whether it’s sheltering from the rain or keeping cool in the sunshine, it provides the perfect space for year-round outdoor learning and fun!

At Kingfishers Preschool, the children have been busy using their gross motor skills through large-scale construction play outdoors. Using crates, guttering, wooden planks and other large loose parts, the children worked together to design, build, balance, lift and problem-solve as they created their own imaginative structures and obstacle courses.

Large-scale construction play offers so many valuable learning opportunities in the Early Years. As children carry, stack, push and position heavy and awkward objects, they are developing their core strength, coordination, balance and spatial awareness. These experiences help to build the strong muscles needed later for fine motor skills such as writing and self-care tasks.

Construction play also encourages communication, teamwork and critical thinking as children share ideas, negotiate roles and test out their own solutions. The open-ended nature of loose parts inspires creativity, resilience and confidence, allowing children to take risks safely and become deeply engaged in their learning.

It has been wonderful to watch the children’s determination, imagination and sense of achievement as they worked together to bring their ideas to life.

The children have been busy exploring our local area and learning about different parts of the world, which inspired some very exciting imaginary adventures before half term! 🌍✈️

Our role play area was transformed into Sharon’s very own aeroplane, ready to take off to “everywhere”… including South America, Africa, Niger and even Florida! The children loved buying their tickets before climbing aboard, choosing their seats and taking turns to be the pilots flying everyone safely to their destination. 🧳☀️

Through their imaginative play, the children shared stories, worked together, explored new vocabulary and went on some wonderful adventures together. It was lovely to see their creativity and excitement as they travelled the world from the preschool room! 💙

Before half term, we travelled to Niger through baking as the children made Shuku Shuku — a delicious coconut treat!

We explored the flag of Niger and talked about how Daphrose and Antoine, our persona dolls, have been missing their favourite snack from home. The children enjoyed sniffing, measuring and mixing coconut, sugar, flour, nutmeg and other ingredients before carefully baking them in a “very hot” oven. 🥥👩‍🍳

There were lots of conversations about the different smells and textures, with many children saying how much they loved the smell of coconut! Activities like this help children learn about different cultures and traditions through hands-on experiences and shared enjoyment. ✨

Welcome Back - we have an exciting few weeks ahead!