Yes, February was cold, wet and stormy, but February in Abington was full of fun activities and a fantastic atmosphere. It was another great month.
Our children have learned so much through our events and monthly themes carried out in February. It has been a wonderful opportunity to show appreciation for people we love during the course of this month. Love was in the air in Abington, with our St Valentines Day themed activities. We hope you all liked your beautiful cards from your thoughtful children.
Just a note to say that our baby rooms are nearing capacity in all of our creches for 2020 so we would like to advise any parents that might be expecting and if you require any sibling places, please enrol as soon as possible. Application forms are available from us (Creche Managers) or you can also contact Kim from our Admissions Team on kim.jones@linkschildcare.ie.
The next newsletter for Abington will be the April issue. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy reading the February newsletter and check out some pictures from the month.
I am sad to say that this is my last newsletter in Links Childcare Abington and I would like to say a HUGE thanks for all your support and respect I have received from all of you during my time in Abington. You are fantastic parents and I will miss you all. Your children are amazing and I am already missing them very much but I will pop in sometime to say hello.
Thanks for your kind words, gifts and hugs. It has made me feel very appreciated.
Best Wishes,
Eliane
Eliane McMahon—Crèche Manager
Baby Room News
We welcomed the month of February with lots of learning about the season of Spring, flowers and colours.
We enjoyed sensory spring activities, with paint, flowers and different art work that we added on our white board. This included butterflies, rainbows, frogs and lot of spring flowers. We created a treasure Spring box and we added in spring animals, colourful flowers and different textures. We also created sensory flower bottles that our babies love shaking. It is really soothing for them to watch the flowers float in the wáter in the bottles. Sometimes our Educarers open them so we can smell the flowers inside.
The color topic was our favourite! We did lots of messy play with colourful wáter and colourful sensory bags. We painted oat with food colorant and we did our own hand paint with yogurt and food colours too. Our colour monsters was so crazy and different with loads of colours and textures. It was so much fun.
This month we have also had a great time with our weekly events, which included:
Balance Week:
We love celebrating balance week because we have the oportunity to continue improving our motor skills. Throughout this week we have used the song “look at me I´m doing the balance here, with the ball on my tummy, yeeep”. We can experiment lots of exercices with balls and rolling toys and we loved doing tummy time and walking holding our Educarers hands.
St. Valentines Week:
We love hugs and cuddles so this week was one of our favourite. We sang the song “hugs, and kisses, just for you, just to tell you (name of the baby), I love you”; we did many sensory hearts with different materials and we loved play with them. We did a sensory Valentines bag and a card for our family to tell them how much we love them.
National Bird Day:
We love animals, so this day was so amazing, we created different colour birds with our hands and we read a story about a friendly bird. We also made a beautiful little house for the birds on our garden. What a funny day we had.
Carnival Day:
Dressing up is so amazing and fun and we were all dressed up as different animals and we had a party with lots of music and dance.
Children’s Dental Health Week:
Even if some of us don´t have teeth, we know the importance of keeping them healthly at a young age. We played with a big mouth activity and toothbrush to learn how we will brush our teeth and we sang a song about brushing our teeth -“this is the way I brush my teeth, brush my teeth, brush my teeth, this is the way I brush my teeth, after all meals”.
In March, we will learn about St, Patricks Day, and we will continue learning and playing with animals on the zoo and clothes. We are looking forward to discovering and exploring new fun things about all of these topics.
Wobbler Room News
This month has been full of colors and flowers and we have enjoyed learning and experimenting a lot.
Our wobblers have enjoyed learning all about Spring. We created our Spring tree with flowers of many colors, and we have also enjoyed learning about colors at the same time. Our Educarers helped us create a giant rainbow and we glued papers of different colors and made a mural printing our hands with all the colors that we like the most. We have also played with colored ribbons. We loved throwing them in the air and seeing how they fell when they fall, and we have enjoyed learning about the growth of flowers.
We planted chickpeas, first putting them between cotton and water to germinate and then planting them on soil to see, day by day, how they grow.
This month we have also celebrated some lovely weekly events.
At the beginning of the month we celebrated Balance Day. This day always enchants us because it allows us to have a lot of fun while we learn more about our body and our motor skills. We created a balance circuit and we used music to learn movements like up and down, move from left to right, jump, turning around and rolling over.
On February 14th, we celebrated St Valentine’s Day by creating a card, in which we put a heart that we had decorated with colored papers and all our love.
On the international day of the wild bird, we created our own birds by sticking feathers in a plastic cup, and our Educarers hung them from a branch and so we can greet them every day. We love to look through the window to see the birds and now we have the possibility of having them inside our rooms through our lovely artwork we created.
We had a carnival party to celebrate Carnival Day and enjoyed a disco party with lots of dancing. We have a great time with our toddlers friends and we love to celebrate this type of party and events, as it gives us a great opportunity to share very funny moments with our Educarers and with all our friends. We love the carnival!
To end the month, we talked about our children’s dental health, and learned the importance of having good dental health, using toothbrushes to clean the teeth of a toy mouth.
Next month we will celebrate one of our favorite parties, on St. Patrick’s Day. We will learn about the animals of the zoo and we will also enjoy learning about clothes and what to wear during the different types of weather patterns. As always, our Educarers will take into account our interests and preferences when programming activities so that, through play and fun, we continue to learn in a complete way.
Toddler Room News
This month has been full of fun and learning for all of our toddlers! With the arrival of February, we started talking about the season of Spring. We learned the different elements of Spring, such as the sun, flowers, trees, birds. We were also lucky enough to enjoy the snow and play in it for a little while.
The first weeks of the month we were discovering colours of the rainbow, and we made a rainbow with our own handprints. We learned the name of all the colours in English and Spanish. We painted our own spring flowers using our favourite colours, and then stuck them next to our rainbow to create our own spring art in class. In addition, we made our own plants with a vase full of flowers and bouquets of flowers to help make our room even more lovely and bright.
Our toddlers favourite activity was the tea party, where we engaged in lots of role play, which included baking, making tea and shared our food. It is great for their social development and also sharing skills and they love it so much fun!
To take care of our bird friends, we built a birdhouse and decorated it with many colors. We were also able to enjoy the carnival. First we talked about what carnival is, and to feel that we were in carnival mode, we made colourful crowns, with feathers and glitter. The toddlers came all dressed up as dinosaurs, dragons, princesses and our Educarers dressed up too.
We also enjoyed Balance Day, where we all did yoga – our favourite position was the flamenco position! This type of activity is great for our physical development.
Our toddlers learned the importance of taking good care of our little teeth. They loved showing their healthy teeth to our friends through smiles. And we had loads of games and activities when we counted our teeth and pretended to brush them ourselves. Hopefully this will make it easier for our parents to help them to brush their teeth at home now.
Preschool Room
Our preschool children kick started February with Balance Week, and we enjoyed lots of relaxing yoga. It was so funny watching our pre-schoolers trying to do yoga figures, such as the tree pose and downward dog. We played a lot of games in the garden and jumped from one leg to the other. We made a circuit full of obstacles: a tunnel, some squares to jump, a rope to run around, some cones to make zigzags. WOW! We finished this activity so exhausted! But that wasn’t everything. We learnt how to warm up our bodies before doing exercises. Now we look like real athletes every day.
We learnt about dinosaur and with the help of our art and craft and songs like “dinosaurs stomp”, our pre-schoolers were having fun while learning why today there are no dinosaurs, as well as concepts like what they eat, how many types of dinosaurs there are, and how we can classify them. WE WERE PALEONTOLOGISTS FOR ONE DAY! We took our tools, brushes, hats and vests and… AHA! We found a lot of dinosaur bones buried in the sand. We had to be very careful, they could break at any moment. But we know how to take care of them, because we have some new books about dinosaurs and we are now experts.
The following days, and led by the interests of the children we learned about the next season of Spring. In it, we learned that the animals that were hibernating stop doing so; and with the appearance of flowers, certain insects arrive like bees and ladybugs. We prepared our activities about butterflies, which we loved learning about. Do you know that they change from caterpillars to beautiful butterflies? It’s like magic! So, we filled the windows with them. Now our windows look so beautiful and colourful. During those days when we were working on our Spring theme, suddenly the weather surprised us and it started to snow! The whole preschool class put on our warm coats, hats and gloves quickly to enjoy the snow, and the children were very excited about the arrival of the snow and had a great time.
We became experts in planting seeds. We will bring home the plants we grew with a lot of care and dedication. We learned how to plant so, we are ready to help our mums and dads with the garden and planting at home.
On St Valentine’s Day, we set to work to create our best cards for our loved ones. In them, our pre-schoolers put all their love to make St Valentine’s Day an unforgettable day for their parents.
Preschoolers love role play, and it is such important part of their development. This month we created our own supermarket, Ice-cream shop and our hair salon. Our Educarers helped gather lots of recycling material to build their shops and salons and to make our children’s imaginations turn into real live tangible play. When we finished it, they all enjoyed taking turns role-playing as sellers, clients and buyers. It was an amazing experience and was loads of imagination involved. They are incredible creatives.
National Bird Day was lovely as we love learning about our bird friends. We love to wake up hearing their symphony, and some children stated that they live our bird friends to live near their crèche so they can enjoy them every day. So, we made some bird feeders and houses and we placed them in the garden. Now, we can hear their singing daily. They really like their new houses… because we painted them using all the colors of the rainbow.
At the end of that week we celebrated Carnival, so we had to hurry to prepare the best costume. Pre-schoolers made amazing colourful masks with feathers, glitter and more. In time for our big carnival day, we all chose the best costume to enjoy the amazing day. At our party, we learned in which countries this type of party takes place and what it consists of. Then we all enjoyed dancing and singing our favourite songs on our Activity Street. It was a fantastic party, with lots of Samba from Brazil and Spanish traditional music, dancing to their favourite Cha Cha.
We finished the month with our Dental Health Week, where our preschool students learned how a good diet is beneficial for the care of our teeth. In addition, we enjoyed practicing brushing our teeth through games and arts.
So as you can see, we had a jam packed month of fun activities for our pre-schoolers, that helps them develop their knowledge and learn in the best way through playing. But also, we had a sad time saying goodbye to our amazing Crèche Manager Eliane. We knew she couldn’t leave without a piece of us. For this reason, the whole crèche made a huge farewell letter and card for her.
From here, Eliane, we wish you the best in your new role as Manager in Links Childcare Leopardstown, and we have no doubt you will be just as amazing there as you have been here in Abington.
Our preschool bears Mario, Elsa, Louis are so popular in our preschool rooms, he goes to all the parties we have! Everyone is loving having the chance to bring them home for a visit and everyone is being very patient waiting for their turn. If you haven’t had a turn yet, you will very soon.
After-school Room
February was an exciting month in our Afterschool Room. We had a lot of fun in the month of the love and we can say that was an awesome month.
The first week of the month we did a treasure hunt. We started making our own treasures and adding things into our treasure chest, such as coins and “treasure”. This chest is placed in our room so we can go back to it and play after homework time.
Kim, our dance teacher showed us some new moves during Balance Week, and we loved dancing to the songs and being active.
And we couldn’t believe our eyes when we saw snow in February. We played with the snow in the garden and we attempted to have a friendly snowball fight. Although there wasn’t much snow, it was a novelty to see it and experience the fun of it, even for a short while.
For St Valentine’s Day, we created love cards for our parents and decorated them with lots of lovely glitter and colourful paper. For us, it was important for us to make this ourselves and give this present to our parents to show how much we love them.
During midterm break, we spend the whole day in the crèche and enjoyed plenty of arts, craft and games. We held an art competition and our children’s drawings were amazing!
Carnival Day was also celebrated, and we created masked and dressed up with our best costumes for the huge party that we shared with the younger children. Loads of competition and games was enjoyed by us all.
It was a great time for our afterschool children to chill out and really enjoy games at their leisure. They explored different drama games and activities that helps develop their memory, team work and communication skills. The children worked in groups following a set of rules and acted out various roles including their favourite Disney characters as well as acting out the multiple roles that people play in our community.
The last week of the month we dedicated it to dinosaurs, and we painted dinosaurs on our wall. We also investigate about dinosaurs and we created our own Jurassic Park.
In the garden we had a lot of fun with games like zombies, duck and goose and sports but also with a airplane competition that we had a game that we created called Airplane Tag.
