Welcome to the November edition of our newsletter from Links Childcare Balbriggan.
November has been a busy month in all our rooms, as we prepare for our Christmas concert and our festive winter celebrations. We have been concentrating very hard on learning all the lines to our Christmas songs and we cannot wait to give you all a festive performance to remember. We hope you like our Christmas decorations! Our children and our afterschool children worked very hard to help us decorate it.
We had a month of learning all about the winter season and the changing of the weather. Our Educarers taught us all about winter hibernation and the different types of animals who hibernate in the winter in order to keep themselves and their little ones safe during the cold months.
Our STEM learning was a great way for our children to learn about this important topic. It opened up conversations about counting, coding, science and more.
And thank you to all our parents who voted in the Links Childcare Employee of the Year for 2019. Your voice and your vote matters. Thank you for your time in doing this and the winners for Links Balbriggan will be announced very shortly in the coming days.
Last but not least, we would like to send you all a massive THANK YOU for all your gorgeous shoe boxes for the Team Hope Shoe Box Appeal. Collectively you helped Links Childcare collect almost 300 shoe boxes. These will all be going to a great home this Christmas and will make a child very happy.
We hope you enjoy our newsletter and we look forward to lots more fun & festive learning next month.
Kind regards,
Lisa
Lisa McCabe —Crèche Manager
Baby Room News
Our babies explored loads of textures, and one of their favourite is paint. They enjoyed painting with their hands and feeling the coldness of the paint against their skin. With these activities they made a melted snowman and snowflakes.
One of the babies’ showed a big interest in animals, so they enjoyed some art activities about lots of different animals. They also loved exploring the different sounds that the animals make and we sang lots of songs and and read some nice books about our animal friends.
They experienced the wonderful and messy world of gloop (cornflour and water) and moonsand for messy play and they loved “Mirror Tip Tap”, where they used socks with buttons and tapped their feet in the mirror to make sounds.
Role-play is also something that they love, and although small, they are still very engaged in the different typed of role play, such as The Café, where they make each other cups of tea and the Hair Salon, where you see them brushing and drying their dolls hair.
Wobbler & Toddler Room News
The wobbler and Toddlers had lots of sensory fun this month!
They had fun during Hibernation Day, as they transformed into bears and went to a forest hunt around their rooms. They also enjoyed some baking too and tried their best at measuring ingredients and adding them into the bowls. There were lots of stirring and mixing too, with lots of mess, but that’s all part of the fun. They had lots of winter sensory play like the Winter Box (pinecones + jingle bells), making playdough snowmen and cold water/bubble play and lots more!
We also enjoyed art and making snowmen and making Joshua a Happy Birthday card for turning 2.
Preschool Room News
Some events we enjoyed in Preschool included:
– National STEM day
– Hibernation Day
– Welcoming Winter & Blue Day
– Thanksgiving
Preschool 1:
Some other activities we enjoyed included:
Places of interest in our town
The children told us about the places they visited in our town, so we drew a Community Map of Balbriggan and marked out all the landmark places that make our town so great.
Frozen
A big part of the children’s interest was about the movie Frozen. The children enjoyed dressing up as the characters and dancing to their favourite songs from the movie. We also made our own Olaf and his snowman friends.
Friendship
All children loved sensory play with our Winter Box and they loved building their own structures with STEM materials. We loved reading “The Wishing Star” book, which is a story about a Little Brown Mouse and Little Grey Mouse who are the best of friends. One night they see a sparkling Wishing Star fall into the lake, and so they hurry down the river to find it. But there is only one star, and both mice want to make a wish. It explored their friendship and things we do for our friends.
Emotions/Thanksgiving
As a follow up to friendship week we enjoyed talking about our emotions and feelings and giving thanks to our family and friends.
Preschool 2:
Some other activities we enjoyed included:
Dublin & Balbriggan
We learned about the community that we live in, Balbriggan. We learned all about the different places in our town and we also opened our own supermarket and we role-played as shopkeepers and customers. To pay for the food, each child made their own Unicorn credit card that they got from the Unicorn Bank.
Do you want to build a snowman?
We explored the winter with this interest and the Frozen fever that has griped the nation. We made Olaf’s portrait and took some cute pictures with it. We also made a winter sensory box and had loads of arts and crafts about the winter, like snowmen and icicles.
Olaf and Anna: a true friendship
Frozen is still an interest, and as we were talking all about the importance of friendship, we used our Frozen books to explore this topic and we also made a winter tree and a snowman.
Singing and Dancing with my friends
The friendship interest still maintains in the group, but we also wanted to explore music and learning new instruments, so we had lots of dancing and music and of course our Christmas songs as we prepare for our Christmas Concerts.
Afterschool Room News
Our after schoolers love their arts and crafts they made a Turkey to celebrate Thanksgiving. All the Junior after schoolers worked in the feathers and the Seniors made the body of the Turkey. It was great team work! They put up their Christmas Tree and they are working on a Santa Claus, we can’t wait to see the final results.
We had great group sessions for P.E class and the most requested activity is baking on Fridays, so we did lots of that.
