As the Autumn season truly kicked in, we enjoyed lots of lovely fun learning. We loved learning about the Farm, Autumn colours and materials and
transport too. We celebrated Halloween towards the end of the month with lots of Halloween arts and crafts, games and Dress Up Days.
Our children also loved Pet Day and learning all about different world cuisines during World Food Day. During Beep Beep Day and Road Safety
Week, we did lots of games and activities to help us learn about the importance of road safety.
As always, keep an eye out on our Social Media Channels for photos of our daily activities.
In this newsletter, we have shared some insight into the activities from each of our rooms that has taken place during the month of October. We
hope you enjoying browsing through them.
Joanne Doyle & Clara Brennan – Crèche Managers
Activities from our Baby Room
Our babies were extremely busy this month! We are delighted to welcome Monty, Archie, Ciara, Louis and Miles to our
room! We are looking forward to playing, laughing and creating happy experiences together!
We had great fun experimenting with colours. We chose one colour per day and explored this with creative activities
such as messy play and sensory play.
On Monday, we learnt about the colour blue: with this we painted with the wheels of the car as it was road safety week
and this helped us with our co-ordination and our palmer grip. On Tuesday, we had a red party, we turned the pasta red
using food colouring and had lots of fun playing in our sensory tray. On Wednesday, we made green ice cubes and loved
the feeling of the crushed ice on our feet. On Thursday, we learnt about the colour yellow and learnt the song Mr golden
sun. Finally on Friday, we created our colour box with all the colours we learnt throughout the week.
As we were so busy in the first week, we enjoyed some light entertainment watching Andrea and Cristina doing a puppet
show using the puppets we had made previously in September. In particular we loved Henry the hedgehog!
We loved playing with the small world Jungle. We did this by putting animals in sand and discussing the sounds, colours
and where the animals live.
We have all started to love pizza Fridays in the baby rooms, and because of this we made some pizzas with the
playdough and made chef hats and Aprons! Aaron was very happy to see little helpers in the crèche.
We were extremely excited about Halloween! We have been so busy creating decorations for our room and crèche! We
love exploring the colours of Halloween and using these to create fantastic crafts with our hands and feet! We really
enjoyed seeing our friends dress up for our Halloween party, and loved listening to music and dancing along.
We have had an amazing month and we cannot wait to continue the fun together!
Stories from our Wonderful Wobbler Room
This month our Wobblers have been enjoying exploring activities relating to the topic ofbooks, animals, Autumn and our
emotions.
To explore the topic of books, we created our own picture booklet made up of pictures by the children. The theme for our
book was animals; we had fish, sheep, pig, cow and jellyfish in our book.
When we looked at animals the following week, we used our book as a stimulus for our learning. We really enjoyed getting
messy and putting our animals into sand and water! We love singing songs about animals, our favourite has to be ‘Old Mac
Donald’s’! We made lady bugs, caterpillar, butterflies, and spider crafts to display in our room.
We looked at sea animals the following week to provide a basic understanding of how animals live in different places, and
they do not all require the same types of care or food to survive. We made fishes using salt dough that we later painted.
We absolutely loved discovering new ways to express our emotions! We played games making faces to match how we are
feeling, during this game there were a lot of giggles and smiles! We used colours that we felt were appropriate to the
emotions we felt at the time. Yellow for happy, green for tired, red for hungry!
As we are in Autumn, the children have begun to notice the change in the weather, we use this time as an opportunity to
promote language development, we are using words such as coat, cold, hat and leaves. We absolutely love going out to the
garden and picking leaves to bring our classroom to colour and paint.
Some events we took part in this month was Transport week & Beep Beep Day, World food day and a Halloween Party. We
played a traffic light game in the garden with green meaning Go, red meaning Stop and amber meaning Slow down. The
children love to play this game whilst on the bikes and whist dancing. We love getting messy and creative making Halloween
decorations for our classroom. We have made pumpkins, spiders and ghosts using different materials.
Tales from our Toddler Room
We have had a very busy month and we have all enjoyed exploring the Garden in the Autumn weather.
We have enjoyed creating our nature table and seeing all the items our friends are finding on the way into crèche. One
Morning one of our friends even saw a rainbow and then Lucia taught us the lovely song about the colours of the rainbow.
We created a lovely collage of the rainbow using tissue paper and it looks lovely on top of our birthday wall. We then
created a colour book each to take home with all the different colours from the rainbow.
We loved learning about all the different clothing we wear in the colder weather, and made woolly hats and scarfs to keep
us warm.
As we were getting nearer to Halloween, we learnt a song called “The Witches of Halloween”. We all loved it and loved when
Asier gave us a big (but soft) “FRIGHT” at the end.
We experimented with Sensory activities with the inside of a pumpkin and created green slime. Some of us weren’t too sure
if we liked it or not. We also decorated our room for the Halloween competition and made Halloween Decorations to take
home.
Our senior toddlers had lots of fun this month, they have learning all about different dinosaurs, they made lots of different
dinosaur handprints, they painted the dinosaurs cave using sponges. They really enjoyed their role play stomping and
making lots of noise being dinosaurs.
They had great fun learning all about different transport, they made air, sea and land wall displays and made different
transports associated with each area, for air they made their own airplanes and helicopters using lollipop sticks and pipe
cleaners, they painted the sky and lots of clouds in it. They made cars and trucks with different shapes of paper and made
the land using sand to make rubble, they made ships and boats for the sea, they made boats using sponges and lollipop
stick to use during water play.
Lots of our toddlers were really interested in number and letter, they picked out the first letter of their name and loved
seeing who had the same letters in their name. They really enjoyed learning lots of alphabet and number song.
Our toddlers loved making all of their Halloween decorations and making their class as spooky as possible, they have been
learning lots of spooky songs and talking all about what they are going to dress up as for Halloween and what their
favourite thing to do is.
Pre-School Room News
Our preschool children have really been enjoying all the exciting activities going on this month. All of the children have been very
interested in the changes they see in nature. They have been discussing what changes they have seen lately such as all the leaves
falling from the trees, how its much darker in the morning when they get up for creche and when they’re going home. They have
all really enjoyed collecting leaves and lots of different materials for their nature boxes. Some of the children did lovely leaf
painting with leaves they have collected while out for a walk. They discussed what animals they might see in Autumn such as
hedgehogs and foxes. They made their own hedgehogs with playdough and lollipop sticks and some handprint hedgehogs as
well.
Our preschool children had a great time learning all about road safety and really enjoyed celebrating ‘Beep Beep Day’. They
discussed how to be safe on the roads, how to safely cross the road, looking out for cars. They made cars, traffic lights, road
signals. They brought cones and their road signals up to the garden and made a road and drove around like cars using the bikes.
All of the children got a road safety book going home and loved telling their mummies and daddies how to be safe on the road.
We have been learning a lot about people in our community and what their different roles are. They made firemen helmets and
did lots of role play putting out fires and saving their friends. They made ambulances and discussed all about how doctors and
nurses help people who are hurt and injured. Some of the children had shared stories of when they had been to the doctor or the
hospital and what the doctors needed to help them.
Some of our preschool classes were learning about the human body, they discussed how some people are smaller/ taller than
others and all of the things that make us different from everyone else. They made a life size human body tracing around one of
the children in the class and made eyes, nose, mouth, ears etc and stuck them on the body where they belong. They made their
own fingerprints and used a magnifineglass to see all of the differences between everyone’s fingerprints. During their Music and
movement class they children were singing the hokey pokey song and the dance moves for it.
We were learning all about the farm and farm animals. The children were very interested in all of the different machinery used on
the farm, they named all of the machinery and objects used on the farm, how they are used and what they are needed for. We
discussed what you might find on the farm, animals, plants, trees. We made lots of different arts and crafts like sheep, pigs, cows,
tractors, and carrots. We spoke all about the peas, carrots, and lettuce that we are growing in our greenhouse and what we need
to do to help them grow.
All our preschool rooms have been very busy getting ready for Halloween, they have been telling lots of spooky stories, making
lots of different decorations and discussing what they would like to dress up as. They have been making pumpkins, bats,
mummies, spiders and lots of spider webs to display around the classes. All of our preschool classes have been making lots of
spooky decorations for their classroom doors. They have been learning lots of Halloween songs and dances during their music
and movement classes and made Halloween cooking during baking.
Naíscoil
Our Naíscoil class have had a very busy few weeks learning all about Autumn, Road Safety, community helpers, different
occupations and of course Halloween.
The children were very interested in all of the changes happening outside, they noticed it was ‘getting dark after teatime’ and
when they were going home that it was ‘almost like the middle of the night’, we discussed why it gets darker earlier and how we
can be safe in the dark if we are going outside. We were learning all about different Autumn animals like hedgehogs, foxes, and
what squirrels do in autumn to prepare for winter. We went on Autumn nature hunt in the garden and found lots of different
leaves and conkers and ‘helicopter leaves’, we had lots of fun throwing them in the air and seeing who’s would fall to the ground
first. We did leaf painting and painted our own autumn trees.
During Road safety week we learned all about the different road signals we see around and what they mean, we discussed how
to be safe on the road and what we need to do when crossing the road. We played the traffic light game in the garden and made
a road using cones and poles to use with the bikes. All of the children got a story book all about road safety and a reflector for
them to wear if they are out in the dark.
Since starting our extracurricular activities and the start of the month the children have been very interested in different
occupations and community helpers, we’ve been talking about chefs, bakers, teachers, doctors, and nurses. We made chef hats
for when we have been baking and have been discussing all about food safety and hand washing before and after we bake or eat.
We made doctor bags and made all of the different utensils that are needed for it and made a doctor’s office in the class to help
all of our patients.
We have all been very excited for Halloween and are really enjoying making lots of different decorations for around the class,
we’ve made spiders and spider webs, bats, pumpkins and witches. We’ve been learning lots of different Halloween words in Irish
as well as a Halloween song. We discussed what they will dress up as for Halloween and what they will do at home to celebrate.
Halloween song:
Óiche Shamhna, Óiche Shamhna
Báírín breac, báirín breac, úlla is cnónna, úlla is cnónna
Is maith liom iad, is maith liom iad
Irish words:
Cócaire, doctúir, banaltra, soilse tráchta, fear glas, carr, bád, pumcín,
cnámharlach, púca, scíathnán leather, domháin alla,
After-School Adventures
Our afterschool children had a very busy month, we kick started our extracurricular activities and they are all really enjoying
them. They’re really enjoying the music and movement and baking in particular. They’ve been busy having lots of dance
competitions and have been teacher each other dances to their favourite songs. They have all been sharing lots of helpful tips
when doing their baking and have been sharing all of their favourite recipes they’d love to back in afterschool.
They all loved learning all about the human body and skeleton, they drew life size bodies tracing around their friends and drew
in all of the different body parts and bones that they know. They learned some of the different body part in Spanish during their
Spanish class and learned some different Skeleton songs.
They were busy discussing Autumn and all of the changes that they have seen and noticed over the past few weeks, some
children have brought in lots if different leaves, conkers and nature objects for their nature table and have really enjoyed
exploring the different textures and senses of them all.
All of the children have been very busy getting ready for Halloween and are really enjoying making lots of different decorations
for their classroom. They’ve been telling spooky stories singing Halloween song and sharing poems they know with their
friends. They loved sharing stories of how they celebrate Halloween with their friends and families at how, and what their
favourite part of Halloween is.
