Summer is flying by this year! July in Links Childcare Abington has been another brilliant summer month that was packed full of great activities, lots of learning experiences and most importantly, a very happy atmosphere! We had a busy month welcoming loads of lovely new friends and Educarers that are all settling in very well.
The events this month were fantastic. Many thanks to all our parents for your co-operation. It is so important for your child’s development and we really appreciate all the efforts.
Please see below what fun and interesting activities and learning development all the staff provided this month for all our children.
Baby Room News
It’s lovely to welcome our new babies Will, Hannah and Freya to our Baby Room. Sadly we said fare well to our older children who moved on up to the Wobbler Room. We check up on them and see them all throughout the day and can see how much they are loving their new environment. The best of luck to them and we miss them lots.
We had loads of fun with messy play this month. We love the sand box. We get lots of cars, cups and other small toys so we can make as big a mess as possible. The screeches of happiness, smiles and laughter is such a joy to witness. Our babies really love this activity. We also did gloop. This was so much fun. We stripped the children down to just their nappy so we wouldn’t ruin their clothes. It was the most adorable morning. The children kept touching each other’s tummies and legs. They were examining every little thing and they love the texture. We had such fun doing this activity.
We do lots of story time with our Educarers. The pictures, new sounds and words help to develop the children’s minds. We do lots of funny animal sounds or tractor noises. Some of us get carried away with it, but it is such an enjoyable activity to do. We sing a lot too. Singing helps to distract the children. When its feeding time, we will sing songs too, so the children are still feeling a connection to our Educarers.
We did some counting this month, only 1 to 5, nothing too fancy but we had fun singing songs and painting some numbers.
We painted some fantastic animals, you can see these on our display board in the room. They are so cute. Other activities our babies love doing in our Baby Room include Duplo, colourful bricks, talking about colours and shapes. We build a house and a road for our cars—we are always constructing something every day.
We love to play with the balls. We roll them to each other and throw them around the room. We are practising sharing with this activity. We are learning that it’s ok to pass the ball to each other and that eventually we will get it back to throw it again. Hand to eye co-ordination is being practised too, it’s important and will help to develop the mind as the children grow.
Wobbler Room News
Our wobblers learned a lot of new things and experienced nonstop play. The room was full of fun and giggles. Our elder friends have been promoted to the Toddler Room and we have welcomed many new friends to our room. Throughout this month we have been enjoying the outdoor games a lot and we had a great time.
We have enjoyed building our tent and camping. Sitting around the “campfire” is an experience we loved. We used our hands to paint sticks that resembled the shape of a tent and decorated our scrap books. We also had a great time watching the trees every day, to see if we could spot any birds. We have experimented with leaves, mixing them with water and we have made an apple to decorate the tree that we have in our classroom.
Alongside of this, we enjoyed shredding red tissue paper with our hands—such a mess but so much fun. We also used this activity to sing one of our favourite songs; “Apples and Bananas”. We had a lot of fun playing with blocks and we built a tower that almost reached the sky.
The first week of the month we celebrated Sports week. The weather was very good so we went out to play soccer, basketball, team games and ball games. We had races with the famous words of “ready, steady, go” – what fun!!!
On the 9th we celebrated Dress Up Day. We were all very cute and we celebrated this with a party. We danced and sang our favourite songs. Thanks, parents, for all your efforts.
During the week of the 15th to 19th, we celebrated Science Week. The wobblers made a lava lamp using water, olive oil, food colouring, effervescent tablets and a flashlight. What fun it was, every time that we threw the tablets, a lot of green bubbles appeared.
We dedicated the last week of the month to having fun with fitness. Thanks to all the physical activities we have done this month we have been able to develop our physical abilities, both fine and gross motor skills. Each time we have more awareness of our own body and all the possibilities of movement that we are developing. Jumping is one of the things that we like to do the most and little by little we get better.
Next month, we will be talking about the wonderful world of dinosaurs, Safari and instruments that we can shake. As always, we will consider the individual development of each one of our wobbler children, their interests and preferences, in order to continue learning and enjoying through games and new experiences.
Toddler Room News
This month we have welcomed many wobblers to our room and they are really settling in extremely well.
We have enjoyed a lot of outdoor activities with the sunny weather. We celebrated Marc and Evanka’s birthdays. Both turned the big two years old. We created various beautiful birthday cards with all our friends. We really love to give card’s as a present to our toddlers for their birthdays and equally they love receiving them too.
We have been working with different topics such as camping, trees, science, good manners, sharing and forgiving our friends.
We started the month with Sports Week, where we trained our physical skills and development through different exercises outside. The children encouraged and learnt valuable lessons in sportsmanship and working in a team. This week the children had the opportunity to develop their gross motor skills as well as their teamwork skills and hand-eye co-ordination.
Another exciting event we had was Dress Up Day. We all look so adorable and we had loads of role play throughout the day. We have such a great imagination. In the Toddler Room we had princess Moana, a Hawaiian girl, a beautiful fairy, a unicorn, a cat and superheroes and many more.
Toddlers had been using their artistic skills and imagination as they drew some animals, tree’s and camping sites. We are a very artistic group.
We also have been creating our own trees with real leaves and some pieces of cardboard. We created our own tents with wooden sticks and cardboard too.
Of course, as good campers, we went on a camping trip to the garden with our tents and cooked some skewered “marshmallows” (bananas) on our fire camp. Our camping trip gave us the perfect opportunity to encourage sharing and we loved to spend time together, having fun and enjoying the good weather.
We have improved our knowledge about different topics such as volcanoes as we enjoyed making some volcano experiments during Science Week. We create the eruption of a volcano with vinegar and bicarbonate, and we put some colouring on it to make it super impressive. All of us were so excited and super interested. We loved this activity.
The last week of the month had us focusing on fun and fitness, so we took the advantage of learning how to eat healthier and do some sports. We encouraged group discussions about fitness. To improve our physical development, we did some exercises outdoors and some fitness class.
We had a tea party in the garden with all our friends, learning how to share and enjoy the time and food with our friends.
Preschool Room News
This month was an exceptional busy month for us! Between dressing up as our favourite book or movie characters and taking part in some messy science experiments as part of Science Week—it was such fun all round. We read multiple stories with different plots, characters and hidden meanings. We even listened to some audiobooks too and enjoyed them.
We did lots of art and crafts to celebrate events such as the 4th of July and to recognize the children transitioning from toddlers into pre-school! We enjoyed foot spa’s, water play and many other activities.
One extremely messy but fun part of our month was Science Week! We carried out many experiments in each of the classes. Some of these included making our own lava lamp, a rainbow in a
jar and mixing paint with washing up liquid to make some funky patterns. We also got to make pictures with puffy paint and even did spray painting on big pages too.
The children loved making play dough and forming the perfectly shaped volcano! We had lots of fun witnessing the effects of vinegar, baking soda and red food colouring and what that did to create our magnificent volcano with the other class groups in the creche.
Another thing we got up to was continuing to learn how to bake some delicious treats. This month the children baked their own biscuits and cupcakes and with this we discussed the ingredients, hygiene and measurements. This activity encourages skills relating to counting, order, weight, time, turn taking and fine motor skills!
We had lots of fun out in the garden playing with tents, water balloons and team games. This encourages the development of time management, hand eye co-ordination, teamwork skills, as well as gross and fine motor skills.
The children have spent lots of time learning about the routine of their new classroom & we even created a visual timetable so our Mom’s and Dads can see what the children’s day is like for them. We loved spending time learning how to play with the new toys and exploring them by building houses, fishing rods, making bird houses out of construction toys that we have in our classroom.
This gave the children the opportunity and awareness on the materials they have which will encourage them to develop holistically.
We have been working hard on being kind to our friends, listening to each other and working together to play and interact with each other and our teachers. All in all, a super fun month once again.
