Happy new year to all our parents and children and welcome to our first newsletter of 2020.
It was lovely to see all the children coming back after their Christmas break all refreshed and happy. Our older children were very excited to tell us all about their lovely festive holiday break with their family and friends, and all the lovely gifts they received.
Our new year has started with a jam packed curriculum, full of learning and fun. We enjoyed lots of activities exploring our five senses, and learned about the impacts of pollution and the importance of recycling.
We also celebrated Chinese New Year too and made some lovely arts and crafts for this festive event.
Here is a breakdown of what we got up it, and some photos too.
As of February, our newsletters will be available and distributed to parents every two months. So the next newsletter for Blackrock will be the March edition, then May, and so on. Thank you and we look forward to continuing to share all our news and stories with you through our newsletters.
In the meantime, we hope you enjoy this read, and don’t forget to follow us on Facebook and Instagram.
Many thanks,
Joanne & Esther
Joanne Doyle —Preschool & Afterschool Manager
Esther Martin —Nursery Manager
Baby Room News
Our babies have loved all the activities this month. Although they are younger than our other children, they still show a huge amount of interest in our events and activities.
They love the softness and cuddliness of teddy bears, and we had a lovely teddy bear show, carried out by our Educarers. Our babies love touching their teddy bears and exploring the different textures on them. We sang about our teddy bears body parts and then pointed to the same parts on our babies. They especially loved the tickles on their feet.
We had an amazing baby massage activity using feathers. They loved this activity and some found it so relaxing and we also played with different textures, such as sand, pasta and shredded paper.
For Chinese New Year, with the help of our Educarers, we made a big Chinese Dragon using our footprints and created some lovely masks too. We enjoyed listening to soothing Chinese soft rhythms.
During National Jigsaw Day, we made Disney themed jigsaws, where the babies had to pull the ‘door’ up to discover whose Disney character was under it, and we played with our animal ones too.
Wobbler Room News
Our little wobbler explorers got stuck into our food tasting during our five senses learning. They were very adventurous and tried some new vegetables. We also used other vegetables as stampers and dipped them in coloured paint to form a lovely piece of artwork.
We had a nice picnic with our teddies in the room and painted a big one using our hand prints. For Penguin Day we made a little penguin by stamping our hands together and we made a big iceberg gluing some white paper on it.
Silly Socks Day was very silly indeed, as we decorated a pair of paper socks using fingerprints and paint.
With our children’s emerging interests in transport this month, we made some hot air balloons using paper plates, cars using the wheels as a brush and painted bikes, trucks, helicopters with our hands.
Although it is been cold, we have been enjoying the crisp fresh air and playing in our garden, having a great time riding our bikes and our cars. We played basketball too, which was fun.
For Circus Day, we made a big clown painting with hands, and had an amazing show with our Educarers, which included dancing and singing. For Chinese New Year’s Day, we made art to represent the year of the Rat, using our footprints.
Toddler Room News
In our Toddler Room, we enjoyed many activities, which included:
My Fingers & Toes:
Where we painted our family using our fingers, toes and handprints.
I have 5 senses:
Our toddlers played with the parachute, smelt different flowers and food, painted a big mouth using cardboard, touched different textures with their feet and hands (sand, bubble wrap) and they listened to different noises and musical instruments using a cup.
Chinese New Year:
They made a big dragon using painted paper plates and Chinese fans that children coloured. They also read Chinese stories (about their culture) that one of the families brought in.
We are going to the farm:
They made pigs, turkeys and chicks by stamping their hands on paint, and painted eggs stamping half a potato on white paint. They love singing, and enjoyed ‘Old McDonalds’ and their favourite song, “I was walking in the farm one day”.
For Silly Sock Day, all our children wore their silly & odd socks to crèche and for Penguin Awareness Day, we learned all about penguins, read stories about penguins & made some penguin art too. For National Puzzle Day, we had lots of fun trying to complete lots of various puzzles and even tried our hand at the more complex ones.
The topic of insects was very intriguing to our children, so we spoke about different insects, and looked in the garden for any insects that may be around this time of the year. We made a ladybird and bee paint prints to decorate our room.
For our Colours theme, we learned the colours song, read colours stories and painted our rainbows. We did our own abstract art with colours and paper. And we loved chatting about our Santa presents and spoke about Christmas and the presents we received.
Preschool Room News
Some events we enjoyed in Preschool included:
* Silly Sock Day – All children wore their silly & odd socks to creche
* Penguin Awareness Day – We learned all about penguins, read stories about penguins & made some penguins art activities
* Chinese New Year – We celebrated the Chinese New Year and had a Chinese New Year party
* National Puzzle Day – We had lots of fun trying to complete lots of various puzzles in the creche.
For our recycling theme we talked about recycling, and made a clean & dirty forest out of art material & recyclable material. We also learned about different types of bins & what rubbish goes in which bin. The three “R”s was repeated a lot during our learning—reduce, reuse, recycle and we made recycling bins and robots out of recycled material.
During our 5 Senses learning, we had a sensory box and spoke about all our senses. We had a tasting experiment to see tastes we could explore and we made art activities to support this too.
Human Skeleton and parts of the human body was a nice way for us to learn how our body and bones work. We learned a song about our bones and did skeleton art. Talking about the importance of looking after our bones and being careful was a hot topic, as one of our friends in crèche currently has a broken arm. We looked at x-ray photos to see where the break in his arm was. It was very interesting.
Peers support is very important for children and knowing that we have back up from our peers is important, especially to our preschool children who will be attending primary school this year. Our afterschool children spent time with us and read us stories & thought us some self-help skills that will be good for when we go to big school.
We spoke about what happened in Australia with the bushfires and about the possible solutions to help stop this happening.
Emotions and being able to express them is an important life skill, no matter how young or old you are, and its something that we should practice. We read stories about emotions and showed what it looked like when we are scared, worried or anxious. We painted our worries and learned mindful techniques to chase our worries away.
Lucia brought in new toys for our fantasy box. The children really loved the monsters, fairies, ghosts and unicorns. For our Pyjama Party, we made a tent and did hair styling, had a gentle pillow fight, enjoyed scary story-time, all in the comfort of our own cosy pjs and slippers.
Afterschool Room News
Our afterschool children showed their competitive streak when it came to our dancing competition and talent show. We were on the hunt for the next dancing and talent sensation, and we think we have found them in Links Blackrock!
For Silly Sock Day, all children wore their silly & odd socks in for Penguin Awareness Day, we learned all about penguins and how they survive in their nature habitat.
We did lots of Chinese New Year artwork and had a lovely dragon dance with our Educarers.
National Puzzle Day was a day where we got to challenge our brains and do some complex puzzles. We had lots of fun.
We learned about transport and recycling at the same time, when we made transport vehicles from recycled boxes.
Keeping active is important, and we loved our outdoor play in our roof garden and our PE sessions too. Our Spanish classes started back after the Christmas break also.
