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 & Wobbler Room
Babies practiced their moving skills, and did a circuit with soft blocks and tunnels.
They also liked to play with the farm jigsaw and with the new sensory bottles we made for them. Wobblers were playing with snow in a box, and they loved to put animals inside these boxes to play with.
They did some yoga movements, coloured using chalks and danced to some songs from the movie Frozen
What Have Our Toddlers Been Up To?
Our toddlers enjoyed doing activities about transports. We made paper aeroplanes and showed them how they fly in the air. Music time is also one of our favourite times of the day, and we enjoyed some relaxing music while we chilled out. We also learned some new songs too and our current favourite is ‘Old McDonald had a farm’.
Although cold, we enjoyed fresh air outdoors. We wrapped up warm and went outside to enjoy some games and to play on our bikes. Hide & Seek, Peek a Boo and races were also enjoyed in the outdoors. Family is such an important part of our lives, and we like to talk about our families in crèche too. On our Family Corner, our toddlers were pointing out who was who in their family photos and we drew some self portraits to represent us too.
When learning about our fingers and toes, we made finger puppets and sang songs and made them move with our little fingers.
Preschool Room Adventures
Preschool 1:
In Preschool Room 1 we explored new toys and our new room, as we started our brand new year. We made our own book of stickers by coloring paper with crayons to make the front page. We are going to use these as part of our achievement charts.
We love play dough and love the fact that it is so versatile. We made lots of different shapes and animals with it. We also used these animals to learn about their sounds too.
Our Transport theme got us all discussing about the different means of transport that we can use to get around. Some children got scooters and bikes from Santa Claus and they were telling us about how the loved whizzing around the place with their families.
We played a Noise Game, where we made noises to various types of transport and guessed what they were. We love to embark in group activities in our Pods, and we made a collage with road signs and traffic light systems. We added textures of paint with a sponge to make the road markings. We also talked about aeroplanes and explored feathers, pretending they were aeroplanes flying in the sky.
Playing in our kitchen corner is one of our favourite things to do. We role played Restaurants and Cafes, and took turns going to the supermarket to buy the ingredients for our Restaurant. We also used this play time to learn about colours at the same time, identifying the colours of the toys we were playing with.
Making our own placemats allowed us to learn about where we put our cutlery and how to use them too in the correct way.
Preschool 2:
In Our children loved telling Cris and Andrea all about their Christmas holidays and what they got from Santa Claus. They enjoyed some walks with their families and we expressed these through our artwork too. We talked about the role of our family members and we role played, playing different characters in our families.
We also love anything to do with building and construction, and we built some big towers with our Lego and STEM materials, making bridges and tunnels too. We think we are all going to be amazing engineers when we grow up.
Preschool 3:When we came back from our Christmas holidays, we took a few days to get to know our new room again, as we got some new games and toys too for the new year. We loved our new jigsaws and books and we were also very good at tidying upand putting things back in their rightful spots too. For arts and crafts then we painted our favourite toys and got to bring these art pieces home to display.
Paloma and Alejandra played football games with our children. We learned that playing together and being a part of a team is so much fun and rewarding too. We also looked at story books about Princesses and Princes. We made our own jewels that we think Princesses and Princes would have in their possessions.
Preschool 4:
Our Five Senses theme was a lovely way for our children express and identify their senses of touch, taste and smell. With our eyes blindfolded, we
used a feather to feel its soft touch and we were smelling the lovely aromas from the kitchen to guess what Aaron out Chef was making us for our dinner and lunch. Our children all amazed us when we did the voice test. This involved blindfolding our children and then their friends would say something individually, and they child would identify who was talking, even though they could not see them. They were very good at knowing their friends voices and who was who.
As part of this theme, we learned some new words too, such as smell, taste, sight, touch, coarse, crunchy, sour, bitter, salty.
Preschool 5:
Our children came back from their holidays wanting to tell everything about what they got up to. They decided to draw and ‘show and tell’ about gifts they got from Santa.
We were lucky to experience snow in our garden and we even brought some back to our room and were observing how fast it was melting. We even tried to build a small snowman! Children were still into Christmas songs, so we enjoyed a lot of music and movement, as well as learning some new songs too.
Our observant children noticed some things were missing in the room and advised us to call Detectives. They immediately and went off to look for footprints and fingerprints.
All the children made their own magnifying glass, and detective’s ID. We learned about the role of detectives, about investigation, clues, and uniqueness of our fingerprints and children enjoyed taking their own fingerprints.
We practiced our language and investigation skills through different scavenger hunts and our ‘I spy’ book.
Our children played together and enjoyed sensory play in a huge sandpit to try and discover clues hidden in the sand. In the garden we enjoyed “catching baddies” and bringing them into the station for some questioning.
Preschool 6:
Our children explored their Five Senses their tasting, smelling and sound activities. We did some tastes tests and we were proud to learn that we were very good at identifying different tastes and flavours.
We focused on touch, with an activity that consisted of us burying various objects in a large sandbox. The children had to find the object and recognise it with their eyes closed, due to its shape and texture. We also used cotton and water to differentiate textures and this got them talking about what happens when the cotton wool gets wet, and how its shape changes and the heaviness of it too.
Naíscoil:
In Naíscoil, we started off the month talking about our Christmas holidays and what we all got from Santa.
We were very interested in learning the letters of our names and played with wooden letters to form our names. We saw a crack in the roof and we played at being builders and fixing it with cardboard. For our Human Body &Skeleton topics of learning, we talked about our body and what each part is for. We talked about what we have under our body; our bones, skin and blook cells and we made a X-ray of our hands with white paint and sticks to form the bones
Afterschool Room News
Our children came back very excited after the holidays, and they wanted to tell Alberto, Marina and their friends all about their news, especially the gifts they got from Santa. We all shared our stories with each other.
We added new books to our library that sparked children’s interest so we enjoyed reading stories to each other in small groups. Some children made story related puppets and we all enjoyed some theatre time.
During free play some children decided to open and create a ”good food restaurant”. They all came up with ideas for a healthy menu such as the name, the logo and even the interior of the restaurant. They divided roles and we all enjoyed a really great play together.
Because it was snowing we had a chance to go outside to our garden and explore snow and ice. From this, we spoke about different states of water.
This was followed with a great and friendly snowball fight, of course.
