Welcome to our latest newsletter for Links Childcare Citywest, where we will be sharing our news and photos from February and March. In February, we celebrated St Valentines Day, Recycling Day, our learning all about frogs and butterflies too. World Book Day at the start of March was lovely and we had such fun dressing up and reading with all our friends and Educarers.
Unfortunately, with March being cut short for us all in crèche, we didn’t get the chance to finish up our activities that we had planned for the rest of the month.
We hope our children have been able to do a bit of the curriculum with the children at home through the information we have shared with parents recently?
We have also been working on lots of videos from all of our crèches, put together by our Educarers, Managers and Chefs, and shared with you all via our Links Childcare Facebook and Instagram social pages. If you and your children have been following them, we hope you have enjoyed them all. And if you are trying any of the experiments or recipes out, and would like to share them with us, we would love to see them also. Please tag us using the hashtag #LinksLearningThroughPlay on your posts, or email them to me, and I will share them with the team.
Our social links are below for Facebook and Instagram, if you would like to take a look.
For now, on behalf of the Citywest team, we wish you well and we would like to say a big hello to all our children. We cannot wait to see all our children again very soon in crèche.
Please keep safe, wash your hands and enjoy this home time with your children as best as we all can.
Best Wishes,
Sonja
Sonja Quinn —Creche Manager
Baby Room News
Our lovely babies enjoyed all the activities we put on for them during the month of February and the start of March. For St Valentine’s Day, they made cards for their parents and decorated them with love hearts and hand prints.
For Carnival Day, we made some cookie monster costumes, and sang lots of carnival songs and dancing too. World Book Day was lovely, as we got to read our favourite books we brought in from home.
For our scrapbook activities we made daffodils handprints and stuck them with colourful paper. We played “pass the ball” outside and sat in a circle in the garden and passed the ball to each other.
With our Spring season upon us, we said hello to Spring and made a blossom tree painting with cotton balls and added yellow painted flowers and shapes.
For our daffodil free play, our Educarers put water and flowers into a sensory tray and the children loved exploring this.
There was a good bit of rain during February, so we sang the raining songs; ”It’s raining it’s pouring” and “rain rain go away”. We painted some umbrellas too. We played with soap foam for sensory play and wet sand during messy play. And we read lots of animal stories, and did animal flashcards and animal sounds.
For the start of St Patrick’s Day celebrations, we started to make decorations and did lots of painting in the colour green, including shamrocks.
Our peek a book tunnel kept our babies active too and they loved rolling around in it.
Wobbler Room News
Our wobblers had a busy time doing lots of various activities during the month of February and the start of March.
Spring—
The children planted seeds to grow and made sunflowers and painted it themselves with their fingers and hands. The coloured in different plants.
With magic sand, they made clouds and the sun with cotton wool and made butterflies using symmetry. They also made a spring tree for their classroom with their handprints.
Carnival Day—
We loved dressing up and made flags and a big carnival wall in our room to decorate the walls. We had musical statues games and enjoyed lots of singing and dancing too.
Story time-
We love to read, and the Hungry Caterpillar story was our favourite for this month, as we are also learning all about the caterpillar and butterflies and how they grow. They brought their teddy caterpillar around the class on our musical train and also painted their own caterpillars and went on a bug hunt in the garden.
Transport—
The children love transport, playing with all the cars and especially the trucks! we made an ambulance from a recycled milk bottle and we painted a car with magic powder puffy paint.
We used the cars and dipped their wheels into paint and drove them along white paper to make track marks and to show the different types of wheels.
Clothes/Clothing—
We made up a basket with different clothing to let the children dress themselves; socks, jumpers, t-shirts, and we played a game to see if the children knew how to put these clothes on or where do they go?
Just before we had to close we were doing lots of arts and crafts for St. Patricks day. We made leprechaun hats, shamrocks, St, Patricks day badges and green playdough too.
Toddler Room News
With the season of Spring upon us, we made different types of flowers and coloured them all different colours. We spoke about the insects that live on the flowers and the bumble bees who take nectar from the flowers. We planted our own seeds too and our toddlers loved getting their hands messy in the soil.
For Princess and Prince Day, our children dressed up and we drew pictures of a castle and dragon and did lots of dancing at our party too.
St Valentines Day, our day of love, where we decorated cards for our mammies and dressed up in red clothes.
For Pancake Tuesday we enjoyed beautiful pancakes made by our brilliant chef Polina, with lemon, sugar or Jam. Best day ever!
During Food Week, we tasted different types of foods, different flavours, and spices/herbs. It was interesting and fun! We made a food pyramid for the classroom and spoke about the good foods we should eat and the ones we should limit too.
Dinosaurs are a huge favourite in our toddler room and for Dinosaur Day, we hid dinosaurs in the garden and went on a hunt. We also froze them in the freezer and did an excavation, and after that we put them into a sand pit and had to try find them through lots of digging. We coloured in pictures of dinosaurs and drew our own pictures of them too.
For our Emotions Week, we spoke about our emotions and used the mirror in the classroom to make faces to describe different emotions. We read a book about emotions and how we feel, when we fall or when we get something nice. We made big paper plate of faces for the classroom.
We got to start off our Saint Patricks Day arts and crafts and painted shamrocks, rainbows and pots of gold at the end of the rainbows. We did finger paintings of Leprechaun’s too and sang our Irish songs.
Preschool Room 1, 2 & 4 News
Our preschool children enjoyed talking about the Spring season and the changes in weather and nature that it brings up. For our Hibernation learning, we explained the process of hibernations and we talked about some animals that carry out this process.
Colours and shapes is something we have really been focusing on and through different activities and games we are not only facilitating the learning of colours but also their memorization. For shapes, we focused on the most basic shapes and to establish learning, we carried out some activities, where the children are able to discover and identify the different shapes in everyday objects, such as their fruit, their pages that they colour in and even things that they can see outside.
Through games, activities and observation we lead children to discover new vocabulary when it comes to talking about sizes and comparisons. We also did activities to reinforce this learning, like identifying different sizes of toys and food items during our lunch breaks.
Preschool Room 3 News
During the start of March, we were getting ready for our St Patrick’s Day decorations and celebrations in creche. Our children made flags to decorate classroom and reception, and we enjoyed group work on a rainbow display and pots of gold. We even made a giant leprechaun and shamrock cookies.
Our children love reading and they have been enjoying The Three Little Pigs, Red Riding Hood, The Big Bad Wolf, to name but a few. They dressed up and did role play too from their story books.
The children learned all about fantasy characters and where they live. They decided they wanted to build a castle out of recyclable materials. World book day was also celebrated this week. All the children had their own books, costumes and face paint.
For Countries and weather, the children learned all about different types of weather through songs, experiments and arts and crafts. Weather was a big interest from many as we experience lots of different types of weather from snow to sunshine.
For their dinosaur topic of learning, we made our own fossils, dinosaur puppets, dinosaur art work.
Spring time is a lovely time to learn all about flowers and inserts and animals that come out at this time of the year. We learned about the life cycle of frogs and butterflies too and it was fascinating for our children to learn all about how they grow from a caterpillar to a butterfly.
