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 babies love to explore their fingers and toes. They are so fascinated by them, and they love it when we incorporate story books and song time in their learning too.
We encouraged the children to clap their hands through songs, when singing about our little toes. We also did tog sprint art and painting.
Through sensory play, we encouraged our babies to pick the sensory bottles and shake, push, pull and roll them, so they could explore the different colours, sounds, and discover what is hiding in some of them.
Our Babies are really engaged in exploring their senses, they love the different textures in the books that we use for story time.
The children enjoyed playing with the teddy bears, they painted, and made some handprints to go with it also.
News from our Wobbler & Toddler Room
Welcome back to all our Wobbler & Toddlers. We also gave a warm welcome to Sofia, who joined our Wobbler Toddler Room.
For our Fingers and Toes themed, our Educarers encouraged our children to count along with their fingers while singing the song “Five Little Ducks”.
We also encouraged them to clap along with the music. Their favourite song this month is “If your happy and you know it”. They get so excited when we start singing this, and the know all the words to it.
The children also used they feet to create beautiful arts and crafts. We also encouraged the children to messy paint by letting them explorer the paint with their fingers rather than using a paintbrush or a sponge.
We made our own rainbows during art, and made clouds using cotton balls. They loved exploring with the different fluffy textures of the cotton balls.
Our children are obsessed with the Construction works outside, and the diggers that go up and down the road. We watch them from the window. They also love playing in the garage, so we they were exploring what is on the road.
They made some arts and crafts related to the topic of transport, such as traffic lights and different types of cars. We also had a “traffic light” messy play session, when they were scooping, pouring pasta and pompoms.
Preschool & After-school 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.
All the children were so excited when they arrived in one day and our garden was covered in snow! We had so much fun with shovels, scoops, cups, trying to build castles and a very little snowman!
Five Senses:
We made two sensory boxes, one with soft items and other with hard objects. The children were having lots of fun touching the objects and deciding which box they belonged to. We also learnt a song about Five Senses too and have been enjoying singing this.
Human Body:
We explored about our emotions by using our new emotional chart, where we can express how we are feeling now.
We also talked about our bodies, especially our bones, and how they all work together to make our joints move.
Recycling:
Teaching our children about the fundamental importance of recycling for our environment allows our children to be aware of the small steps they need to take in help our environment grow and sustain.
We all gathered together to make recycling bins and learned about the different items that get disposed in them. They took turns being bin collectors too, which they enjoyed.
Space & Planets:
We discovered the planets, asteroids, meteoroids, and planets by reading the book “A place for Pluto”. All children made arts and crafts about spaceships, the galaxy and we talked about Aliens too.
Animals from the Jungle:
We are exploring the animals that live in the jungle following the book “Giraffes can’t dance”. With this story,we are also learning about the power of being ourselves and the acceptance of everybody around us.
Transport:
We discovered different transports as the air hot balloon, the sailboats, or the submarine. We also had so much fun with messy play: we really enjoyed freezing cars and play with them in the water.
