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.
News from our Wobbler & Toddler Room
Our theme our around fingers and toes was a perfect way to make children more aware of their bodies and their action.
We listened and danced to different songs like “How many fingers?” and “One Little Finger” by Super Simple Songs and “Finger Family Song” by Nursery Rhymes, among others.
We also used our handprints and footprints for painting and then we could observe their shape and counted how many fingers and toes we have.
In addition, we played with some finger play exercises like “Two Little Black Birds”, “The Itsy Bitsy Spider”, “Open Shut Them” and more.
Our wobblers and toddlers love getting little jobs to do. So our Educarers gave them some tasks in where they had to use their fingers, like removing objects which were stuck onto adhesive tape to different surfaces. We also introducing objects in different sized containers too so they took practice taking them out.
“It feels soft” was one of our topics of learning, tying it in with our Fingers & Toes theme.
They loved exploring their textured books as an introduction of this topic. We have a box with every day objects and natural elements (teddy bear, cotton balls, wool, pompoms, pillow, stones, blocks etc.) and they loved exploring this freely. We also walked in our bare feet on soft and hard surfaces, to experience these textures also with these parts of our bodies.
We listened to and made some body movements with different songs like “Textures Song for kids” and then learnt some key words like “soft”, “hard”, “feels”.
And we played with play dough and soft and hard objects; showing them the difference between the soft and hard elements.
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.
Five Senses:
What better way to explore our senses of taste, than by tasting different types of foods ad smelling them and guessing what they are. We spoke about the different types of tastes; sweet, sour, bitter and sharp. And we had a great time baking too and tasting our homemade creations.
Our children did a blind folding test, where they blind folded their eyes and picked up various items and tried to guess what they were.
For our sense of hearing, we made different animal sounds to guess which animals we were trying to represent.
We also painted with porridge and vanilla essence on bubble wrap
Human Body:
For our Human Body theme, we read a book about it and sang songs too. The children loved doing an experiment showing how our heart and lungs function.
The children have made an x-ray handprint picture using cotton buds and they drew different parts of the body. They also learned about people who take care of our body (Doctors, Nurses and Dentists) and enjoyed doing role play about them.
Recycling:
To teach the children the importance of Recycling, the children used three cardboard boxes and made a recycling box, general waste box and compose box. The children helped to paint each box, and once it was done and the boxes where dry we done some roll play. Using our toys in crèche our children picked what they thought would go into recycling, general waste and the compose bin. The children enjoyed this activity.
Other Activities:
For Fit and Fun Day the children wanted to get different designs painted on their arms/hands, so they made their own play dough to bring home and played musical chairs and tennis in the garden. The children were all super tired going home that day.
We have such a love and fascination for dinosaurs, and we read and talked about them. The children enjoyed learning about their diet and extinction. We made an archaeological display with sand, bones and dinosaurs where the children needed to find the bones. This was great fun.
