Happy New Year to all our parents, guardians and children.
I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas together and I hope the new year brings health and happiness. As we face into our 3rd lockdown in Ireland, it may appear to be difficult to see a bright new year ahead, but I believe that, if we all work together, we can do this. We look forward to days in the future when we can welcome our parents and guardians back into our crèches, where you can physically witness all the amazing works of art that your children are doing to adorn our walls.
And where we can welcome you to special events like concerts again.
In this newsletter, we have shared some insight into the activities from each of our rooms, that all took place this month. It was really lovely to see our children and colleagues again, and to engage in so much fun and learning.
As we welcomed back some children to our crèches, we are missing our children who have not returned to us this month. Since the start of January, we have been adding daily videos on our Social Media Channels for our children at home to enjoy.
We hope our children have enjoyed them so far.
Activities from our Baby Room
Our Little Chicks Baby Room loved exploring their fingers and toes and we made hand and footprints, fingerprints and shapes of our bodies to learn more about them.
We learned a new song to name our fingers and we discovered new textures in our toes by exploring with rice grains.
Baby Maya joined our Baby Room, and she is settling in nicely too. For Fun & Fitness Day, we made an amazing circuit in the garden, with different obstacles to go through,
each of us trying to get to the finish line!
And we enjoyed lots of fun in the garden trying to make our first steps by walking by ourselves.
We love to express ourselves through music, and we enjoyed lots of songs and dancing, using our own body as musical instruments.
News from our Wobbler Room
In our Wobbler Room, our wobblers painted their feet to make a footprints and put these on our art pieces.
We made a sensory path in the garden, using sand, feathers, water and leaves feeling the different textures in their toes and feet. And we painted cardboards with
different shapes of sponges, feeling the texture in their hands and fingers.
We got lots of pom-poms inside a box and throw them up so our wobblers can touch, collect and play with them in different ways.
For our Circus theme, we painted a big cardboard box and Aida, our Educarer, drew a funny clown on it, with a few holes around the clown so the children could get small balls
inside each hole.
We painted cardboard plates, glued pom-poms on them and made clown smiles so we could play and imitate clown expressions.
For our Family Tree we included the photos of our new Wobbler friends Ryan, Sophie, Emmet, Ethan and Mark and added them onto our class tree.
Fun and Fit Day really was such fun, as we made an amazing circuit in the garden, with different obstacles to go through, trying to get to the finish line!
What Have Our Toddlers Been Up To?
Our children in our Twinkling Toddler Room enjoyed our Traffic Light Theme this month. They learnt how important traffic lights are in our lives and what is the meaning of the
colours.
When we played outside on our bikes, we brought the learning outside too, by reminding them the colours of the traffic lights of when they need to stop and when they can
go again.
Our Toddlers loved the “head shoulder knees and toes” song and they have learned the different part of their bodies through this. They also enjoyed art and crafts,
drawing and painting their own handprints and silhouettes.
We love playing with the animals and the farm, and we combined this theme with our Circus theme too and made a Circus Farm. They loved to imitate the sound of the
different animal in the books that we read and the songs that we sing together.
For Fit & Fun Day, we did lots of jumping, running and playing in the garden, enjoying the fresh January air at the same time.
We discovered a love for clay and made this to create different shapes.
Preschool Room Adventures
We had a busy start to the new year, exploring the themes of Five Senses, the Human Body and Recycling as part of our monthly curriculum.
The Mighty Lions Preschool Room :
Five Senses:
Educarers (Rachel and Lourdes) helped children to trace out their hands and supplied them with a range of different fabrics with various textures to apply to each finger. This was
a great way for the children to explore their sense of touch!
Rachel borrowed some salt, sugar, rice and lentils from Chef Charlie for the children in Preschool 1 to mix with paint and to partake in some sensory painting.
Lourdes created some ‘mouth’ artwork with the children using cotton wool as the teeth.
We also made a box dedicated to our five senses with the children, encouraging the children to gather their own items.
The sensory box included musical instruments, pasta, feathers, cotton wool, and food from our class kitchen.
And for our baking session, Lourdes baked chocolate buns with the children to explore the children’s sense of taste.
Human Body:
Our Educarers helped children explore how we can use our body parts to be creative by doing hand, finger and foot paintings in class. The children thoroughly enjoyed this,
especially the messiness!
Rachel traced out Oisín’s body shape on a large piece of paper and sat down with part of the class to discuss each body part and to colour the body in. We then hung the
picture up on our art wall to display. Oisín and his friends loved this!
We also created and cut up different body parts and made them available to children who wanted to glue and make their own person.
All our children enjoyed a dance party in class to emphasize the great things our body does for us daily. This was great as the class loves to dance
Afterschool Room News
The children loved to learn about the human body and how the human body works. We read a book all about our human body
and we learnt the main areas of our body.
To extend our knowledge we drew our own bodies and we learnt about our different skin types, hair types, eye colours.
For our recycling theme, we created three different types of bins and we talked about how we help with the rubbish at home.
We created a game called “guess which bin”, this involved the children having to guess which rubbish goes in which bin.
When learning about our senses, we talked about all our senses and to explore our sense of touch we decided to create
different textures.
We made gloop, play dough and we played with sand. We compared the different textures.
Our afterschool children love volcanoes! We learnt the different types of volcanos and we also created our very own volcano
