What a fun few months we have had.
We kick started the new year of 2022 with our New Years Resolutions and enjoyed exploring our 5 senses, the human body and the human skeleton, as well as the circus. Our children also loved National Puzzle Day and creating some very cool inventions during Inventors Day. In February, we celebrated Chinese New Year, St Valentines Day and enjoyed Balance Day and had so much fun for Carnival Day.
Keep an eye out on our Social Media Channels for photos of our daily activities.
In this newsletter, we have shared some insight into the activities from each of our rooms that has taken place during the month of January and February. We hope you enjoy browsing through them.
Sarah Spencer – Acting Crèche Manager
Activities from our Baby Room
As we came back after the Christmas break we got used to being back with our friends and Educarers. We organized our family tree and enjoyed our music sessions and making homemade shakers. We got a music box so we can hear the different sounds and learned some new dance moves.
Our babies were learning about animals and what sounds they make and we were painting animal shapes too.
The month of February was full of lots of exciting activities. To start the month off our babies enjoyed activities about transport and explored the different types. They dipped the cars into paint and made tracks.
We sang The Wheels On The Bus song and we also were busy looking out the window at the different vehicles driving past our crèche.
We focused on colours and shapes and used our blocks to do stamping activities with blocks of different shapes. Amber showed the babies some flash cards of different colours.
For St Valentine’s Day we were busy making cards for our families. The babies are enjoying listening to music and dancing with Celia & Veronica.
We celebrated Spanish Carnival and made head bands to wear home and enjoyed lots of messy play activities including water play, gloop, sensory bags and painting.
Stories from our Wonderful Wobbler Room
Our Wobblers talked about their fingers and toes and found out all the things that we can do with them. We painted our fingers and toes and pressed them into our pages to create animal prints and shapes. We counted from 1 to 5 and sang songs with different rhymes, shaking hands and feet in front of the mirror up and down.
We made a sensory path with different materials for our wobblers to enjoy. It was filled with different textures such as rice, sand and water.
Our Educarers encouraged our children to walk along it and feel the textures in their toes.
We made a big poster with our fingers simulating bees because they love this insect from the garden and read books about bees to enhance our learning.
For our Circus theme, we talked about clowns, jugglers, and acrobats. We made noses, painted clowns with different techniques and made a theatre with finger puppets for our Puppet Show.
In February we focused on colours, spring, and growing flowers. Every morning we love to sit down and explore our ‘magic box’. With this we learned about the weather, days of the week, emotions, and daily activities.
We created our own flowers using different materials like paint, crepe paper, and shapes. We loved reading books and calling out the colours of the flowers, trees, and grass. We love learning songs about springtime too.
Another topic was colours, and with this we focused on one colour per week. The first colour we looked at was yellow, where we created our own book ‘Pepe the chick’. We had to decorate our own Pepe the chick with paint, feathers, and paper. We made yellow playdough and enjoyed making many objects and shapes out of this. We experimented with yellow peppers, lemons, and jelly.
The following week the colour was red, this came at the time of St Valentine’s Day. We created a card and red hearts made with different materials. In addition to this we played with red water and played a game of find something red in the classroom.
Finally, we focused on the colour blue, where we made blue pictures such as the ocean and the sky. We made these for our display wall.
We really enjoy dancing and singing throughout our day, the children love the song ‘walking in the jungle and the freeze song’.
Tales from our Toddler Room
Our Toddlers loved learning about their fingers and toes, the circus, and the sky.
With our fingers and toes topic, we worked how many we have in our hands and feet’s, what we can do with them, what size they are and how our nails work.
For our circus topic, we listened to circus music and we had a clown costume for dress up.
For our sky topic we talked about how far it is, what we can see in the sky, and things we can identity, such as a full moon, the stars, planes and clouds.
In February, our children learned a lot about their emotions and the colours that match the emotion e.g., red is angry, blue is sad. We did this through a story called ‘The Colour Monster’. We created a theatre and our own emotion monsters. We had lots of giggles watching this amazing show!
We made lovely St Valentines cards for our family members and we loved talking about all the people we love and how we show love to each other. We had a disco to celebrate this too!
As the children are noticing the change in the weather and on the tree’s, we decided to look at ‘Spring’ as a topic. With this we discussed how it is getting dark later, the change of the leaves on the tree’s and how the flowers will start to grow again! We love to make many crafts relating to Spring such as our own tree and flowers for our classroom display.
Our favourite time in February had to be the Spanish carnival! The children were busy all week preparing costumes for themselves and for their Educarers! They loved listening to traditional music of Spain and dancing along.
We really look forward to learning and developing more in March.
Pre-School Room News
Our Pre-school children enjoyed learning about recycling, five senses and the human skeleton. We learned about the different things we need to recycle and which items go into which bins.
For our Five Senses, we created a box of senses were the children discovered different textures and we made a little monsters after reading the book “The Colour Monster”.
Our big skeleton, made from pasta and straws really enhanced our learning about the human skeleton and parts of our bodies. We learned also about how our bones work.
We were also extremely busy exploring the topics of food, dinosaurs, spring, insects, and music.
We explored different traditional foods from all over the world and spoke about the importance of food and why we need to eat healthy food.
Our children read lots of stories about dinosaurs and we enjoyed learning the names of the different dinosaurs! We created our own dinosaur bones using salt dough; with these we put them into sand and explored them in there too.
We love music in our room, and we love to sing and listen to music. We love to play percussion instruments and have begun to use some music notation too.
Celebrating events like St Valentines Day, Mini Beasts Day and Spanish Carnival was so much fun. We love to make crafts and have a disco party to celebrate these too.
During February, we were learning about the life cycle of a butterfly, Saint Valentine, and different flags from around the world.
The first week we made different variations of butterflies and we looked at the different stages of their lifecycle and created a display for this too.
The second week we discussed spring. The children loved to explore the differences between each season, discuss the weather and create pictures of spring animals and flowers.
Next, we played a role play game where the children were explorers. We created dinosaur bones and dinosaur crafts. The children loved to find out new facts about the dinosaurs they made.
Finally, we learned about three countries, Spain, England, and Ireland. We created a map for the wall and a flag from the selected countries. The children loved to learn about the different cultures and traditions of these countries and share their own experiences.
We loved learning some basic Spanish commands this month as part of our extra curriculum activities, the children love to greet their friends in their morning and before they go home in Spanish.
