Dear Parents,

Welcome to our Newsletter for December.
We loved getting ready for the festive Christmas season, and we were very busy making lots of festive arts and crafts.

We especially loved the Santa Letter Box we made together, and we loved putting letters and drawings into it.

We love our count down to Christmas chart and we go to it every to tick off the days until Christmas. Our preschool children had a Carole singing competition. It was too hard to find a winner, so they all won.

 

Themed Events, Curriculum & Other Activities:

We loved learning all about artic animals and what they do during the Winter seasons for food and shelter. We have made our own versions of artic displays in class and our children enjoyed decorating them.

With the Christmas season almost upon us, we have been thinking of all the people we have missed seeing in 2020. We spoke about our grandparents, cousins and friends. We then decided we would like to make Christmas cards for residents in Nursing Homes close to our creche, so we got out all our colourful paper, glitter, arts and crafts supplies and made the most gorgeous Christmas cards. They were sent to the residents of Dalkey Care Unit, and we received the most beautiful and heartfelt card and message of thanks back from them. We are so happy that the residents loved our cards, and we enjoying making them smile.

And Christmas isn’t Christmas without festive Christmas jumpers! We loved wearing them in and the children enjoyed showing off their ones.
We are supporting Focus Ireland this Christmas during our Christmas Jumper Days.

We explored lots of sensory activities with sand, flour, pasta and bubbles. And we also enjoyed lots of fresh air playing outside.

 

Nursery Rooms 

Our babies loved to play with cars. They were pretending to be in a car, using a box and rolled the wheels of their cars on paint and paper and made some lovely textured artwork. Loved to see the little marks that it leaved on the paper. They also enjoyed doing jigsaws.

Our wobblers loved playing in the garden with the leaves. They learned about winter clothes, painted using sponges and made a big snowman. They enjoyed reading the Lion Puppet book and were imitating the actions.

Preschool Rooms

Our preschool children were cooperating and developing open-ended play in the Construction and Stem areas of the rooms.
Their play has no pre-determined limitations or “right” or “wrong” ways to use the blocks, the broad stair and the pink tower. Their play allowed them to take their time to develop their own ideas, follow their own creativity and shared experiences.
They are communicating and are developing critical thinking skills as well as fine motor and construction skills through active play-based learning. They also loved exploring Christmas related items in our sensory boxes and made Christmas trees out of STEM materials. We painted fruit and made pasta necklaces and made snow twigs for our nature box.

We created a brilliant Santa count down calendar, where they add a ball of cotton wool to Santa’s beard every day. This is a great way for them to develop a sense of time.

Annual Employee Award Winner: 

Our Annual Employee Awards for 2020 were awarded to Natalia San Segundo Agudo and Jokin Oloriz Calvo. Both are so worthy and it is well deserved. They are fantastic with children. They are both such professionals, have a great work ethic and are super organised, fun and engaging. Congratuations to both Jokin and Natalia.

 

 

Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year for 2021.

Joanne, Esther & the Links Blackrock Team

Joanne Doyle, Esther Martin —Créche Managers