Each Monday over the summer season I am going to be writing about a minibeast themed activity and trying to include fine and gross motor skills within the focus of the piece.

This week I want to share with you two Plan Toys games available from The Toadstool that are perfect for summer, fit with the minibeast theme and each one focuses on fine or gross motor skills.

If your children loves bugs and games as much as mine do then they will love these two activities.

Bee Hives Game
I bought this game for Esther at Christmas. She played with it a little then, aged three and a half, but it is only this Spring and Summer that she has chosen to take the game out herself and use it regularly.

The Plan Toys game is beautifully made from painted wood. The colours are bright. There are six hives and six matching bees. The game also comes with tweezers or tongs. This is a game that can be played in many ways, by children of different ages and abilities, learning different concepts and skills.

Bee Hives is great for colour identifcation and colour matching. Children can use their fingers to move the bees before they are ready to try and manipulate the tongs or tweezers.

It is great for developing concentration and the pincer grip when using the tongs to place bees in the correctly coloured hive. Using the tweezers builds the muscles and movements needed in the fingers for writing so this is a great pre writing activity.

The hives can be stacked in a number of arrangements making it more difficult to place and remove the bees from the hives. You can arrange the hives on a flat surface or build them up like a tower. It is a great way of introducing tesselation to small children. The stacking also allows for creative thought as you find as many different ways to stack the hives as possible while still being able to place a bee in each one.

The bees and hives can be used for a memory game. Under which hive is the blue bee? What colour hive is hiding the red bee? They can also be used for a speed game, who can put all the bees into the right hives with the tweezers in the quickest time. We have not tried this yet but I can see it could be quite competitive and great fun.

Esther also loves to use the bees and the hives for acting out stories. William joins in with her and acts out scenarios. It is lovely to hear them chat and create together but really William is more of a stacking and sorting kind of boy. He likes to know how things work.

We have been playing with our Bees Game lots over the last few weeks and have started to extend the play by adding coloured pom poms. Esther likes to make cosy nests for the bees and William likes to use the tweezers to sort coloured pom poms in the hives and also, to allow more options, an ice cube tray.

The open endedness of this game is one of the best things for me. It can be used in so many ways that at less than £20 it is great value for money.

The pom pom addition has been brilliant fun and helped us to explore patterns and colours more, and make better us of the tweezers for manipulating different objects.

A great game that is cleverly designed and beautifully made for small hands.

Meadow Ring Toss
This is another game that we have had for ages. We were actually sent it to review by The Toadstool and I have really struggled. Mostly because Esther and William have not been able to use it as it is designed to be used.

The Plan Toys Meadow Ring Toss is like the traditional game Hoopla. You have to throw rope hoops and try to get them onto short wooden poles.

It is a beautiful game, wonderfully made with little people in mind.

It is another Plan Toys game that can be used in many different ways with children of all ages and abilities.

The game is supposed to be hook your hoop over the correct pole, the hoops and poles are colour coordinated.

Esther and William can match the colours easily enough and can place the rings on the correct sticks, what they cannot do is throw from any distance with any accuracy. And because of this they very quickly get fed up with trying.

But we are persevering with their throwing ability and their accuracy.

We have started trying to get all the rings around one of the poles. They like trying to do this and are starting to have some success.

But what they like doing most of all is using the rings and the poles and the removable bases as accessories in their imaginative play.

For the first few times of trying to play this game all Esther and William wanted to do was perform Incy Wincey Spider. They were really rather good. The blue tagged hoops were the raindrops and the poles were the plungers that Incy uses to make his way up the spout!

Esther loves to use the bases for the poles as clip clop shoes and they both like to use them as microphones!

As the Summer has started and we have been playing with the set more and more, Esther and William are beginning to understand how the game is supposed to be played they are just not yet able to do so independently.

They can match the colours, they can place the correct rope ring on the correct pole, they can try to throw a very tiny distance but they are not yet able to stand further away and throw and experience any success.

We have found some ways of using the game that help to develop gross motor skills in alternative ways. We have some plastic frogs that we use like tiddly winks, trying to get the frog to jump into a rope ring and we use the poles and hoops to create obstacle courses and slalom for our wooden cars.

I think over the course of the summer Esther and William’s gross motor skills will develop enough for them to start playing this game as it is meant to be played.

But for now we are having minibeast and motor skill fun like this.

We were sent one Meadow Ring Toss Game for the purpose of this review