Little Rainbows Lutterworth Community Pre-school

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We found out about Fathers’ Story Week on the Internet. We advertised it at pre-school about three weeks beforehand in our newsletter, so that it gave dads enough notice to book time off work.

We planned to have books accessible outside each of the children’s rooms (we have 3 rooms) for them to take home with them for bedtime stories with dad – and children were changing the books daily.

We also used the ‘Box of Dad’ idea from the Fathers’ Story Week resources section [link to that page], asking the children to bring in a shoebox containing some of their dads’ things. This was really successful. Children shared their Box of Dad with the other children during circle time. One child even bought his Dad into the session to tell the children about what he did, he was a policeman and talked to the children about ‘Stranger Danger’.

On the last day of Fathers’ Story Week we invited the dads into a session and made paper aeroplanes with them [link to resources section again]. We were very lucky to have had an inspection from OFSTED on this day, so they saw all of the fantastic things we were doing…this was our first inspection as we have only been running for 6 months as a charity (after saving our 120 place pre-school from closure) so to say we were chuffed to bits is rather an understatement!

Box of Dad was fab - children had collected objects that belonged to Dad, some objects were real eye openers!

We felt a lot of fathers wanted to come into session, but through work commitments weren’t able to, so we made sure all the children made their aeroplanes to take home so that they could fly them together at home.

We do invite Dads to come in on our gardening days, where we have built raised borders and planted seeds and dug together, this was fairly well turned out. Dads also come along to parents evenings and to our pub quizzes, which we run 4 times a year.

We are soon setting up a website so that extended families and dads can have access to see what we have been up to, If there is a dispute with mum for any reason they will at least be able to see what their child has learned about at pre-school, and will be able to see any important dates for their diaries.

It would be great to get all dads into sessions to teach them HOW to PLAY, and to see the world through the eyes of a child, it is so good for your soul.