Welcome to the November edition of our newsletter from Links Childcare Blackrock.
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 Grotto & decorations!
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 Kindness theme was a great way for our children to learn about this important topic. It opened up conversations about how we should treat our friends and family members, and people in general.
Thanks to some of our lovely grandparents who joined us for story telling, as we celebrated Grandparents Day.
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 Blackrock 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. We collected close to 70 shoe boxes in Blackrock, and 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,
Joanne & Esther
Joanne Doyle —Preschool & Afterschool Manager
Esther Martin —Nursery Manager
Baby Room News
It was lovely seeing all our babies so engaged in our events and activities this month. They are growing up so quickly and progressing all so well.
Events and activities in our Baby Rooms this month included:
– Our Pets, Music week, Sports week, Winter is coming, Autumn is here and We are artists.
Here is a round up below of what we got up to.
– Our Pets:
– Our babies decorated their favourite animal using glitter and read stories about dogs and cats. They loved singing the ‘Old McDonald’s song’ too.
– Music Week: They had fun making a Pentagram and put the notes (made with their handprint) on it. They sang in English and Spanish and played drums and xylophone too.
– Sports Week: It was so much fun as our babies painted different sport balls (football, basketball, tennis) and did messy play using plastic balls. We also played with a big soft tennis ball with all our friends.
– Autumn is Here: They decorate their room and played with lots of leaves with all their friends.
– We are Artist: They coloured on a large sheet of paper using crayons to decorate the room.
Wobbler Room News
Our wobblers were so excited to learn about space, fruit and exploring some new music too, which they love. Here is a summary of what the got up to:
– We love fruit: We have been learning all about different types of fruits and vegetable and we painted them using their hands. We loved exploring textures of cucumber, bananas, orange and aubergines too.
– Blast off – Our wobblers had great fun painting planets and choosing different colours by themselves (using hands and brushes). They also made a rocket to put on their space display board.
– We love music – They had fun making a guitar costume using paper and made instruments using plastic bottles and rice, beans. We had a lovely concert at the end of the week, they loved it!
– We love butterflies – Our wobblers painted tissue paper using paint and water to make their butterflies wings and loved our butterfly story books too.
– We go to the theatre: It was a day of puppet fun, as we played with our sock puppets and had our very own Puppet Show.
Toddler Room News
For Grandparents Day, some of our grandparents came in to read some stories with us. Thank you to all of them! We loved to share the morning with them and our children were so happy and excited to introduce their grannies and grandads to their friends & Educarers. Equally, they were excited to show our Grandparents their rooms too and where they sit, and where they hang their coats and bags.
For our Winter animals and clothes theme, we learnt about winter animals, such as penguins, polar bears, seals and artic foxes. They also painted hats with pompoms on them and gloves using handprints and their favourite colours.
We are so excited about Christmas and we painted our own Christmas tree and made elves using handprints, Santa using cardboard and reindeers using sticks.
For our “When I grow up I want to be” theme, we made little chefs and firefighters using their handprint, painted our own Garda hats and they also painted their own picture as an important artist (very messy but lots of fun!)
For Make a difference day , we focused on our actions and did something nice for our friends and for World Kindness Day, we made flower cards for our friends and a kindness tree. We also had fun drawing our turkeys for Thanksgiving too.
We also had the following activities and themed:
– The Space , where we made aliens and planets
– Farm Animals, where we spoke about different animals on farm, sounds they make and that we get milk from the cow. We made cows, pigs and sheep from paper plates.
– Dinosaurs, where we read stories about dinosaurs, did dinosaurs handprints and acted out a dinosaur story.
Preschool Room News
Some events we enjoyed in Preschool included:
– Make a Difference Day
– World Kindness Day
– Grandparents Day
– Thanksgiving Day
Our preschool children loved creating their Kindness Tree. We all helped to paint the tree, and every time a child showed an act of kindness, we displayed this on our kindness tree by writing on it. It is a lovely way for our children to learn that little acts of kindness are so important.
We also had a Kind words sensory lesson, where we used pom poms and sandpaper to help to indicate the physical feelings kind or unkind words can have on us. We showed that unkind words hurt feelings like the rough feeling of sandpaper can feel rough on our skin and kind words feel soft like pom poms.
For our role playing, we created our own local Post Office. We made envelopes and letters for our friends. We pulled names from a hat and sent letters to the friend we picked. We sent the letters home with our friends so our parents could see too.
Some other activities we enjoyed included:
– Self Help skills – we noticed the children started to be more interested in doing things for themselves so we focused on our achievement chart a lot this month.
– Grandparents Day – we made signs to welcome and thank our grandparents for coming in. We also made golden medals to celebrate the day.
– Christmas concert – we did lots of practising for our Christmas concert
– North pole – we made a north pole experience and we made snowflakes and snowmen and had lots of fun pretending to be in the north pole.
– Our Community – we made policemen and firemen hats and made lifeguard boards. We spoke about everyone who helps us in the community
– Hibernation – it was fun making owls, bears and foxes. We also made a hibernation station.
– Winter – we made polar bears and penguins and spoke about the winter weather
Afterschool Room News
Make a difference day was when we focused on our actions and did something nice for our friends.
For World Kindness Day we made flower cards for our friends and a kindness tree for our room.
It was lovely to see some of our Grandparents visit us for Grandparents Day. They kindly came in and read us lots of stories. Thank you to all the grandparents who gave up their time to come in and visit us.
For Thanksgiving Day, we did fun activities celebrating Thanksgiving Day.
For our Olympics, theme, we had Links Olympics in the garden and played lots of games, with some serious competition on the go.
Messy Play involved sand play and messy painting without brushes, with lots of designs using only our hands.
