Activity challenge #4 Indoor sandcastles

Last week, Miss F and I went to visit her cousin in London.  Not far from my Sister's house is a park with a sand pit base. Yes, I know it's the middle of winter but we went nonetheless armed with buckets and spades. The children had a great time. Whats not to love about sliding into a giant sandcastle?!

After returning home Miss F constantly talked about the sandpit. In fact it was all she spoke about for days. Now, we are garden-less and the nearest sandpit to us is in, well, London.  So, I recreated the experience for her inside instead.  I will admit it got a little messy but Miss F absolutely loved it. 

So, what did I do? I filled a large tray with a few bags of economy cheap flour and some seashells that I'd bought some time ago. We set about filling little buckets (I used stacking cups) to make little sandcastles, finishing them off with little straws for flags. Miss F had a blast so it was completely worth the mess!

Activity challenge # 3 - A Colour hunt

The sun is shining this week, (I wrote this post when this was true) a rare occurrence for an English summer so we're taking took advantage by finding lots of outdoor activities.

A colour treasure hunt.

Lady F is learning more colour based words. She is a little obsessed with yellow so on a sunny Monday morning we took a bag and stroll around the village to find as many instances of yellow as possible.

We found lots of yellow shapes on all sorts of objects. It really is amazing what you spot when you're looking. 

It was a good opportunity to discuss shapes and the purpose of each item. A good vocabulary booster for tots developing their speech too.!

We also found the colour yellow in nature and even collected some to take home. This was Lady F's favourite part. 'Der you go' she'd say as she popped them into her container.

When we got home we lay our spoils out on the table. We talked (I talked) about the different shades of yellow and even lined the flowers and leaves up according to size. We then topped off our  yellow morning with a delicious yellow (mango) smoothie. Yum