A Spring In Our Step
As we stepped into Spring at the start of February, it felt like there was a change in the air.
A change in the brightness of the day, with the evenings getting a little bit longer, and even a change in the growth around us, with the little peaks of
daffodils slowing emerging up from their sleepy roots.
It is a welcome change, and we are looking forward to much more that the Spring season brings to us.
Our children have loved being together again; learning about Spring, insects, colours and their favourite thing to play with – dinosaurs! We had enjoyed learning from each other too, and just all have fun together. We are still missing all of our friends who have yet to return back to crèche yet with us, but we
look forward to when that will be again. Hopefully very soon.
In the meantime, we hope our children at home have been enjoying the videos we have posted on our Social Media Channels. And we hope they are enjoying some of our curriculum learning at home too.
Feel free to share any activities you have been enjoying at home with us.
In this monthly newsletter, we have shared some insight into the activities from each of our rooms.
Just a additional note to say that our Baby Rooms are nearing capacity in all of our crèches for 2021 so we would like to advise any parents that might be expecting and if you require
any sibling places, please enroll as soon as possible. Application forms are available from us or you can also contact Kim from our Admissions Team on kim.jones@linkschildcare.ie.
Stay Safe.
JOANNE & ESTHER – C R È C H E M A N A G E RS
Activities from our Baby Room
Our babies enjoyed lots of lovely different types of artwork this month. They glued pieces of paper onto a big heart and painted their St Valentine’s Day cards using their handprints
to resemble butterflies.
They also loved to read farm animals books and play with the farm characters too.
Our babies really enjoyed water play, for our Colours and Sea World theme.
To celebrate the season of Spring, our babies explored the topic of Springtime and Farm Animals through art, water play, story time and music and movement.
Stories from our Wonderful Wobbler Room
Wobblers were having such fun exploring with different paint colours. They loved to rip paper into small pieces and sticking them onto their pages. And they really loved to paint using their hands and red colours to make St
Valentine’s Day medals. They painted Valentines cards using heart shapes and apples. As well as this, out wobblers baked heart shapes out of salt dough, painted with water onto red paper.
For our Transport theme, we made tunnels using blocks and passed cars under them.
They also played with train tracks and other cars and trucks.
Carnival Day was a day for making masks. We made a big smiley face mask, gluing small pieces of tissue paper onto it to make it all cheery and bright.
Tails From Our Toddler Room
Our toddlers love sea animals and were making jelly fish using tissue paper. They were decorating the names of the animals with different materials to classify animals under them.
They made small paper balls and glued them decorating their own truck.
And for our St Valentine’s Day art, our toddlers coloured heart shapes and glued sparkly circles for cards and painted a stick to make a rain stick instrument.
We loved creating a Puppet Show too using different emotion masks.
Preschool Room News
Our preschool and Naíscoil children enjoyed lots of activities, which included them learning about dragons, dinosaurs, insects and bugs and St Valentines Day.
What a busy month we have had in all our Preschool Rooms. We enjoyed Balance Day, Carnival Day, St Valentines Day and ate lots of yummy pancakes for Pancake Tuesday! Here is a round up of what we did in detail.
El Carnival is celebrated all around the world and it was lovely to celebrate it in our own special way too in our Preschool Rooms. We had such a great Carnival Party. We looked up
lots of different costumes from around the world and ways in which people celebrate this festival in different ways in various countries.
After our Carnival Day, we gravitated to Space and the Galaxies! For our Universe, we painted our sky with our hands, painted stars with cotton sticks, read a space story,
made rockets with cardboard boxes, making galaxies and some 3D planets.
For our Shapes & Colours theme, we had to find shapes around our classrooms and identify them. We sang shape songs and read books about them too. Learning all the
colours of the rainbow was fun, as we incorporated it with art too and made a rainbow with our fingertips. We mixed colours of paint to create different shades pf colours, which
was really interesting.
For St Valentine’s Day we made cards for our loved ones and love heart puzzles and ones out of clay too. St Valentines Day hopscotch was also enjoyed outside.
Oh, we are so happy that Spring is here. We talked about flowers and different animals that we can see and find in
Springtime. We also planted some seeds and watched them grow so we can care for them.
For our Dinosaur theme, which is part of our February Curriculum, we learned about different types of dinosaurs and what they eat and their colours. We made dinosaur bones from cardboard boxes and we hid them and had a dino hunt.
It was wonderful for our children to discover that you could turn an old cardboard box into a brilliant car with wheels!
We did this when we were learning about transport and different ways of travelling.
In keeping with our recycling theme, we love looking out the window and watching the bin trucks collect the rubbish bins. We also spoke about the importance of saving water
during hand washing and made a recycling box for our rubbish.
Our children love to explore with STEM materials. We made a robot out of them this month and they all worked really well together.
Our topic about the world saw us exploring maps and looking at where different countries are located.
For Balance Day we enjoyed lots of balance games to improve our balance skills.
As well as all of these activities, we did painting with magic paint, which was when we put water on cardboard, and did a sensory activity which saw us walking on sponges.
We enjoyed messy play, playdough and talking about our feelings. And for music time, we were so excited to take part in the Jerusalem dance challenge and used our own
instruments for our live band.
Some of our children became big brothers and sisters, so we spoke about babies and siblings, and some of our siblings starting in crèche too. We explored the life cycle of the butterfly and learned who it transforms from a caterpillar to a butterfly.
To end the days, we did some Yoga to relax our minds and learned about balance and different yoga poses.
Naíscoil Room News
Our children loved learning about Land Animals, what the eat and where they live.
As Springtime approves, we talked about what happens in Spring, which flowers grow and what they need to make them grow. We made daffodils using paper, cupcake cases and lollipop sticks.
Learning about the life cycle of a frog was a huge topic of interest for our children. They loved learning about the different steps, what they need to grow from a tadpole to a frog and how long it takes. We also made butterflies using paint glitter and pipe cleaners.
For our Dinosaur theme, we spoke about the different dinosaurs, what makes them different, do they eat different foods, and how tall/small they are.
We free painted on a large sheet of paper, using out hands and feet and body, and made animal masks for our Animal Dance Party.
For St Valentines Day we made cards, pictures for our family and friends and made a photobooth and different props.
Afterschool Adventures
Our afterschool enjoyed some planting and making grass dolls using tights, cress, and soil.
For Balance Day, we had lots of activities focusing on balance, including obstacle courses, walking on planks, balancing on one foot competitions.
For St Valentine’s Day, we made cards and different paper flowers for family.
Carnival Day was a day full of dance and singing. We made different carnival masks and accessories.
We love Lego, and we loved making different types of objects such as boats, cars, houses and Lego figures.
