Welcome to our latest newsletter for Links Childcare Balbriggan, where we will be sharing our news and photos from February and March. In February, we celebrated St Valentines Day, Recycling Day, our learning all about frogs and butterflies too. World Book Day at the start of March was lovely and we had such fun dressing up and reading with all our friends and Educarers.
Unfortunately, with March being cut short for us all in crèche, we didn’t get the chance to finish up our activities that we had planned for the rest of the month.
We hope our children have been able to do a bit of the curriculum with the children at home through the information we have shared with parents recently?
We have also been working on lots of videos from all of our crèches, put together by our Educarers, Managers and Chefs, and shared with you all via our Links Childcare Facebook and Instagram social pages. If you and your children have been following them, we hope you have enjoyed them all. And if you are trying any of the experiments or recipes out, and would like to share them with us, we would love to see them also. Please tag us using the hashtag #LinksLearningThroughPlay on your posts, or email them to me, and I will share them with the team.
Our social links are below for Facebook and Instagram, if you would like to take a look.
For now, on behalf of the Balbriggan team, we wish you well and we would like to say a big hello to all our children. We cannot wait to see all our children again very soon in crèche.
Please keep safe, wash your hands and enjoy this home time with your children as best as we all can.
Best Wishes,
Lisa & the Balbriggan Team
Lisa McCabe —Creche Manager
Baby Room News
We welcomed Luca to the baby room, and we celebrated Aaron and Aobhlas birthdays.
The children explored some great activities this month, great fun was had and plenty of smiles and new discovery took place too. Some activities included discovering coloured rice and water (mini planting), shadows and light, painting and printing using potatoes and mirrored animal textures.
The mirrored animal textures were a big hit as they loved seeing the reflections of the animals and feeling the sensory textures too.
Wobbler & Toddler Room News
We have had huge interest in farm and zoo animals in the past two months. The children are really developing language skills and sounds, and we have been working on the different animal sounds and recognition. We enjoyed many arts and crafts and themed days.
Our farm animals were played with a lot and we used bright coloured paints to paint the feet and make animal foot prints too. Our Educarers showed us how to make play dough and we created lots of different shapes with them too.
For St Valentines Day, we made cupcakes and decorated them with little hearts. We made pizza plates and talked about the different foods we like to eat, pizza being amongst one of our favourite things.
We started our St Patricks Day decorations at the start of March and decorated flags and hats. Exploring the colour green was both messy and fun. We used lots of green paint to decorate our artwork.
Happy Birthday to Kate!
Preschool Room News
What a playful and learning month we have had. The children are really engaging with each other and learning from one another’s surroundings.
We had many Interests this month and we loved exploring them in our Preschool Rooms with our friends.
Role play is something that we love to do with our friends and Educarers. For Valentines Day, we set up a flower shop and we had little customers coming in to buy flowers for their loved ones. We also did some planting of flowers too and sowed some seeds, and pretended we worked in a Garden Centre.
For our restaurant and coffee shop play, the children created their own menu of favourite foods that they like to eat and served it up to their friends. We all took turns in playing the various characters and they are really good at taking turns and sharing roles.
With insects being a favourite amongst our children, it was fitting to learn about the lifecycle of butterflies and frogs through our curriculum. The children made an illustrated timeline to show how a caterpillar grows in a butterfly.
Baking is something that we do in creche a lot, and we love it. Not only are we able to eat yummy baked goods afterwards, we are also learning how to count and measure ingredients out too. We made some lovely cookies and cupcakes in February and during the start of March.
For our Pirate Day, we had huge excitement and fun. We made our own map of the creche centre and searched for our treasure this was so much fun for the children.
We took full advantage of the brighter days and we had plenty of outdoor games and of course our favourite Spanish action songs in the garden.
We celebrated Adam, Lillie-rose, Archie, Luke, Shauna and Ellas birthdays too.
Afterschool News
Our afterschool children made salt dough hearts for St Valentines Day and we were so busy making a large cardboard zoo and jungle animals for the centre to display around. This was a huge interest in the creche with our children.
They loved designing the sets and scenes and using their creative ideas to create lovely play areas for them and our children.
Happy Birthday to Connor and Aobha from our Afterschool Room.
