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.
Just a note to say that our baby rooms are nearing capacity in all of our creches for 2020 so we would like to advise any parents that might be expecting and if you require any sibling places, please enrol as soon as possible. Application forms are available from us (Creche Managers) or you can also contact Kim from our Admissions Team on kim.jones@linkschildcare.ie.
As of February, our newsletters will be available and distributed to parents every two months. So the next newsletter for Citywest 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, (links below).
Many thanks,
Sonja
Sonja Quinn —Crèche Manager
Baby Room News
In the Baby Room, we were kept very busy with lots of sensory play and having great fun with sand gloup and messy painting.
We learned all about our bodies and used them to create art. This week we looked at our fingers and toes and are learning a new song this little piggy. We had great fun with finger and hand puppets. As this week we had a teddy bear event we brought in some teddies & made a teddy bear hut from a recycled box!
Wobbler Room News
Our wobblers enjoyed coming back to play with our friends in the wobbler room after Christmas. We have being learning lots about Spanish traditions and spoke about the three wise men. We used cards and crayons to colour the three wise men, which we then displayed in our classroom. It was great fun to look at a rainbow while out in the garden and we used this interest to make our own rainbow from handprints. We enjoyed learning about the colours and getting our hands messy! For our circus theme, we focused on clowns and jugglers, and we used paper plates and sensorial material to make our own clowns. Our wobblers found this great fun. We also painted jugglers using our fingers.
We are focusing on our emotions, we are learning about the different types of emotions and why we may feel that way. We have used this leaning to create different types of emotion art that is on display in the classroom.
Keeping active is something we love to do too, with different types of sports play. We are really enjoying going to the garden to try out different types of sports, such as football and basketball. From this garden activity we have created fun art activities and we painted the types of sports equipment that we see and play with each day. As we really enjoy exploring the home corner and playing with all the different equipment in that area we have used these interests to create more meaningful activities that we can enjoy. We have used the real life material to create a “real” kitchen environment and used our imaginations to create different meals & types of food. We then added playdough to make some pizzas. We looked at the types of vegetables we may see in the kitchen and have used this learning to create art. We made lots of vegetables to display in the classroom. For Chinese New Year we made rat art to symbolise the year of the Rat and Chinese lanterns.
Toddler Room News
For our body parts learning, our toddlers looked and talked about facial features. We created an art display on our facial features, and we then looked at the parts of the hands and feet.
We learned all about the Spanish traditions of the Three Wise Men, and learned about the story behind it & where they originated from. We created a 3 wise men art display for our art wall also.
Using body flash cards helped us to further enhance our learning and we discussed different parts of our bodies. We made a body alien with lots of eyes and crazy hair and named him Tod.
We had lots of fun with messy play and we used cooked pasta, dry rice and dry pasta and paint to explore the different textures.
Farm animals are a huge interest to our toddlers, and it’s been a fun learning experience so far. We used straw & brown play dough to create mud and added animals to this to create a farm stimulation. We talked about the animals, what they eat and where they live on the farm. We looked at cows and pigs we had our own display of big cows and pigs. Making a “real life cow” from an old box and gloves and painting it was lots of fun. It was Sophie’s 2nd birthday too and we celebrated it with lots of fruit.
For our Winnie the Pooh theme, we used our hands and feet to create pooh bear prints and piglets toes.
Talking about peoples in our community who help us further allowed us to learn and talk more about our community and professions. From doctors and nurses, to firemen and Garda, we talked about who we might see when we arrive at the doctors, what equipment they use. We did lots of role play and art around this theme.
We made musical instruments from old recycled bottles and had a concert using these.
Preschool Room
We had a jam packed month of activities across our three preschool rooms for the month of January. Here is a week by week review of what we got up to in each class.
Preschool Room 1
06/01/2020—For five senses we discussed all about how we use our five senses. We created and then added our new five senses book to the ‘me and my world’ centre that is in the classroom. The children created a sensory board out of different materials that was in our art and sensory centre. This board can now develop the children’s touch, feel, and look and listen senses.
13/01/2020—For our food and recycling curriculum the children created a food pyramid display. This display had cut out food from magazines and real life food boxes. For recycling the pre-schoolers made two recycling bins, one black and the other one green. The children learned also about reduce, reuse and recycling. For winnie the pooh day we all gathered around the cosy corner and enjoyed listening to Winnie the Pooh stories.
20/01/2020—Our medical themed involved talking about the role of doctors and nurses and being hurt. We created a hospital role play centre in the classroom. In preparing this set up, the pre-schoolers made hats and gathered what costumes was needed and created blankets for the patients. For arts and crafts the children created a nurse’s uniform. Books introduced this week was Zog that talked all about doctors. We celebrated Chinese New Year by creating a dragon, lantern’s, a rat and china flags.
27/01/2020—For superhero the children created a batman and superman cape, superhero figures. To celebrate puzzle day the children created a Spiderman puzzle that linked in with both theme and event day.
Preschool Room 2
06/01/2020—All About Me: we were talking about how many brothers and sisters we have, what’s our favourite colours and how old we are. As a group we made rainbows with all the shared information.
Five Senses: we made a sensory box with different textures. We made a magic box and what they have to guess what it is feeling. The pre-schoolers also smelled different spices through blind fold and they had to try describe what it was.
13/01/2020—Recycling – we painted the different bins for the class and they learned how to sort rubbish and that they can do in school and at home to help the environment.
Body parts – we drew one mini person and drew the parts and made it into a game and had to find where the parts belonged to in the game.
20/01/2020—For our alphabet learning, we made an animal alphabet to learn the entire alphabet. The children began to write their own names. For our hairdressing theme, the children created their own hair salon in the classroom and created crazy hair. The children celebrated Chinese new year by created dragons, a Chinese fan and lanterns.
Preschool Room 3
06/01/2020—This week the children explored spices from our kitchen, they tasted and smell them. This developed into making a spice poster to keep in our room to smell. The pre-schoolers also made a sensory board to hang up next to the spice board. For sound they explored the different shakers and for touch they created the game “what’s in the box?” we had lots of sensory games sand, flour, bubbles, play doh and slime.
13/01/2020—For the human skeleton the children talked about all of the bones, made skeleton puzzles to help build a skeleton. Art and crafts was involved by doing handprints with bones that included cotton buds, skeleton puppet and x-ray box.
20/01/2020—The activities that connected with pollution was a story about Freddie the Fish. They used plastic, paper, sponge to pollute the water. The children then learned how to clean the water. It was hard but successful. The children continue to recycle their paper.
27/01/2020—The children created their own solar system on the display wall. They also introduced new books into the literacy centre about earth and the outer space.
