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 Room
The babies started their return from Christmas with lots of sensory play.
Our Educarers made sensory bags for the children in the class, with hair gel, glitter, gloupe, sand, rice and coconut.
The children love messy play. We had a lovely Teddy Bears picnic and used our cosy corner to sit and read stories to our babies. We also used our sensory books for this, so they could feel the textures.
Our babies love to paint, and we did lots of finger painting and explored a new while, by using thread in our paintings to created different textures to our artwork.
They loved playing in the snow. Our Educarers collected some snow for the babies and brought it indoors for them to play with so they didn’t get too cold outside.
They are also doing a bit of transport this week and cars, they used the cars in the class and paint to make tire tracks during arts and crafts.
News from our Wobbler Room
Welcome back to all our Wobblers.
When learning about our fingers and toes, our children showed an interest in learning about their body parts. So we sat beside the mirror and spoke about our faces, our
nose, ears and mouth.
We spoke about our hands and feet and that we need them to walk and pick up items and things with our hands.
We made lots of arts and crafts with our handprints and footprints.
We used sensory feeling books and felt them with our finger prints to feel different textures to explore our sense of touch and we loved taking off our socks and walking
across bubble wrap to feel it on our feet.
We sang the song head shoulders knees and toes. We also had a lot of dancing as we love singing and dancing.
When the snow arrived, we play outside and felt how cold and wet it was. They were so excited to experience snow for the first time in their lives.
The Circus and Balance:
Our children are learning all about the art of balancing, so have been enjoying lots of balance games in the garden. As well as this, we are earning how to run and stop, and how
to hop on one foot, throwing and catching a ball. We made an obstacle course in the classroom and used the tent for them to play hide and seek.
For our Circus theme, we spoke about what animals are at the circus and we had circus games, and pretend played with the children making animal noises, elephant, horse, lion and tiger. We coloured in circus animals and the tents for arts and crafts.
Fun and Fitness Day had us in the garden learning about exercise and stretching, playing and chasing too.
For transport and traffic lights, we learned about different types of transport and enjoyed lots of pretend play with our cars as we drove them around the classroom. We spoke to
Finn about his daddy as he flies military aeroplanes and he explained to us “Daddy fly’s high in the sky” and showed us a the type pf pane his dad flies to his friends.
We used the cars to make tracks along white paper with paint.
What Have Our Toddlers Been Up To?
Lots of things, as our Educarers prepared a lot of lovely activities for us to explore and enjoy.
To better learn about our Emotions and feelings, we used a mirror in the class and sat making different faces and different funny expressions.
Using emotion flash cards was a good way for us to explains to our children about the types of emotions and how we may be feeling.
We made our own emotion pictures with different colours and we spoke about what makes us happy and what makes us sad. We read a story with different emotions called ‘Glad
monster sad monster’, and ‘The colour monster’. One book was a happy book, one was a sad story that turned out happy!
Anything with wheels, we just love! So we spoke a lot about transport and the different types and how we use them.We can use the aeroplane to go on holidays, we use the car
to go to crèche. We use the train to visit nanny and grandad, and we walk to the park.
We set up a stop and go system in the class with the small world cars and dolls. We drove around the class and using their imagination they visited different places. Some of us
went to the park, others went to the shops and some drove over to the kitchen to get food.
We drew our own interpretations of what a car looks like and the aeroplane.
We spent time out in the garden using pretend play to be aeroplanes and watched the helicopters and planes in the sky that fly over our crèche to the Baldonell Airport.
We also used the coloured cars to play a colour matching game, where we matched all the red cars together and all the yellow and blue into groups. We also used this as a counting activity to see how many cars we had of each colour.
Preschool Room Adventures
We had a busy start to the new year, exploring the themes of Five Senses, the Human Body and Recycling as part of our monthly curriculum.
Our preschool children learned about the Animal Planet this month. They loved exploring different types of animal’s habitats and hibernations.
We made lots of animal arts and crafts with the footprints of animals and we drew our own pictures of what we think animals look like to us.
Pretend play with the animals, farm animals, zoo animals and dinosaurs was also enjoyed in abundance. We spoke about the different animals in the zoo and what animals live here.
We also spoke about wild animals in the jungle and the extinct dinosaurs. We put the toy dinosaurs into water and froze them, and then we then took them out and excavated
them as the ice defrosted.
We spoke about the environment and how it is changing, how this also effects the animals, climate change and how we can help by saving water by turning off the tap when we do
not need the water running and turning off the lights to save electricity.
Learning about the weather was fun too. We sat and had discussions about the weather, what weather the children prefer. Some of them like the snow, most of them love the
warm weather and a small amount of them like the rain.
Five Senses & Human Body:
We are learning about our five senses. We coloured and cut out pictures of our eyes, ears and mouth, we practised with our scissors and cutting skills, complete we glued them back into the places we thought they belonged.
We used our touch sense by making a feely box. The children had to put their hand through a hole and try guess what they object was inside.
We tasted different foods – sweet and sour, bitter and tart. We also used herbs and spices to see what other types of foods tasted like and to see if we liked them or not.
We played the “Marco Polo” game in the garden with our eyes closed although we had a few children peeping! This was to show children the sense of sight.
For our smell senses, we used essential oils on a tissue and everyone got to smell them and pick their favourite from Lavender, vanilla and lemon grass. There was not too much
interest in this activity as the children decided they would rather go out to the garden to the fresh air.
We put on different music in the class and danced to the different beats. We had lots of running around the garden for our fun and fitness week, with obstacle courses, P.E and
a little yoga.
Planets & The Moon:
The children learned about the different planets, what they look like and the different sizes. Is there life on them and did they think there was?
They drew their own aliens and decorated their own planets with glue and sugar paper. They made their own moons with cardboard and tin foil.
They also made their own rocket to visit the moon, we have had many NASA count downs and lift off’s.
Our children also showed off their moon walk around the class. Louise our Educarer from Preschool 3 made a short video to show you how to decorate your own planet. This is available on our Social Media pages.
Afterschool Room News
Our children had lots of fun out in the garden with exercises
and P.E games, such as ‘Stuck in the mud’, ‘Tag’, catching and
chasing, football and basketball.
We love arts and crafts and free choice play. We make a lot of
different types of arts and crafts depending on what they
decide that day. We made our very own hop scotch in our
Activity Street and we also made our own twister game. This
was great fun.
For Invention week, one of the children designed and made
their own television, and we spoke about the different roles in
Television production and acting.
