What a fun few months we have had.
We kick started the new year of 2022 with our New Years Resolutions and enjoyed exploring our 5 senses, the human body and the human skeleton, as well as the circus. Our children also loved National Puzzle Day and creating some very cool inventions during Inventors Day. In February, we celebrated Chinese New Year, St Valentines Day and enjoyed Balance Day and had so much fun for Carnival Day.
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 January and February. We hope you enjoy browsing through them.
Alba Gutierrez – Crèche Manager
Activities from our Baby Room
Learning to grow up:
Our babies and wobblers are interested on improving their autonomy, communication, and psychomotor skills to grow up.
To improve their autonomy, Educarers decided to do activities focused on the daily routines like eating by themselves, sitting on the chair and washing their hands. With this we wanted to reinforce autonomy so they can adapt it to their day-to-day life, especially for the children who are settling in the room.
Focusing on communication skills, we have opted for the repetition of common phrases or words, such as “hello”, “good-bye”, “yes”, “no”, “more” and “please”. Our babies are beginning to recognize language through gestures.
For fine motor skills, our activities focused on the use of the hands, so that they can practise picking up and using small things. For this we have used pegs, puzzles, zippers, pencils and crayons.
For our gross motor skills practise, we encouraged our babies to crawl, roll over and take steps.
Spring a new beginning:
Our children love going out to the garden on a sunny day to enjoy nature, smell the flowers, chase butterflies, or observe all the changes of the season around us.
We have been doing lots of activities and lovely arts and crafts with fruits and leaves too and we picked leaves to show them the different textures.
We learned about colours of the spring like yellow and pink and green. We love seeing the birds coming over to the garden, we always wave and send them kisses. We are enjoying seeing insects in the garden and we try to pick them up working on our fine motor skills.
St Valentine’s Week:
With the celebration of St Valentine’s Day, we have decided to learn feelings such as love, affection, friendship.
We painted love hearts with red paint and added some glitter to it. We also encouraged our children to help each other, with little cuddles and hugs, playing and sharing toys. They love to “high five” to each other.
Stories from our Wonderful Wobbler Room
Science:
Our little boys and girls made a lot of experiments using different kinds of materials such as: food colouring, water, sand, flour, tea, paint, baking soda.
We made playdough and on the next day, we painted the playdough and
made a huge volcano out of it.
Our Educarers helped us add tea herbs and sand to our creation to create a Dinosaur land. We also used vinegar and baking soda to create the lava! They were fascinated with this activity and our wobblers love messy play and making sensory bottles to calm them. We called it “the galaxy inside the bottle”. It was lovely and soothing.
Professions:
Our boys and girls love our chef Marie, and are fascinated about her job, so we decided to learn about different professions: bakers, teachers, chefs, shop assistant, firefighters.
We set up our Links Childcare Supermarket, with our children as shop assistants and customers. We also painted a fire engine in a cardboard with the brushes and sponges. They were delighted painting the fire engine and add colour to it.
Marie, our chef helped us bake cookies and put them in the oven for us. They were very yummy.
Friends And Friendship:
Our wobblers are so kind and they love helping our Educarers and friends. During story time we enjoyed a book called ‘Train’, which talks about friends and sharing. We painted our Wobbler’s Friendship Tree and celebrated St Valentine’s Day, by making lovely hearts using cardboard and lollipop sticks.
Farm Animals:
Our curious boys and girls were very interested in farm animals and the sounds that they make. We made sheep with our handprints, and we add some cotton wool for effect. We painted a cow and a bull and our children had lots of fun during the activity. They love to feel the paint on their hands.
Our Educarers helped the children make a pig farm made out of pasta and a cardboard box; they love playing with the pig’s farm!
Carnival in our crèche was so much fun. We made costumes and were coloured in shirts with the crayons to make a clowns costume.
Tales from our Toddler Room
Pirates and Adventures:
Our toddlers are interested on adventures and pirates so we had a lovely time role playing these interests. We made a telescope out of recycle materials, and an eye patch for real effect and made a treasure box for our treasures and things we found on our adventures.
Spring:
Spring is here, and we made some flowers and added colourful petals on it for our room collage. We had a great time going to the garden and playing with our hoola-hoops and football.
Dinosaurs:
Our children are fascinated by dinosaurs, and we love learning all about the different names of them. We enjoyed arts and crafts, making dinosaur masks, dinosaur foot prints and even used playdoh to make fossils out of.
Our dinosaurs hunt sensory play was so much fun and we used sand box to hide and dig our dinosaurs in.
For story time we read “Dinosaurs and Diggers” and “The Great T-Rex Adventures” and we made a volcano using paint and a recycled cardboard box.
Music and Dancing:
Our children were interested in activities relating to music and dance. They love to learn new lyrics and dances and music gives us such a happy feeling. We create our toddler song, with musical notes painted with our finger prints and mademaracas with paper rolls and rice.
Pre-School Room News
Here in Pre-school, we love to play outdoors, and we are especially enjoying our new garden space with our new playframes. We enjoyed lots of dancing and learned about our body parts, and how are body moves and what our bones do when we are dancing. We painted a skeleton with our fingers, and we named some of the bones. We also started talking about our teeth and how important is to brush our teeth every day. This led to us talking about the Tooth Fairy and what happens when you lose a tooth.
We have been learning our numbers and we can more count up to fifteen.
For St Valentines Day, we baked love heart shaped cookies and made cards to bring home to our loved ones.
For our Me and My World, we learned about the Solar System, planets, stars and galaxies.
For our Five Senses learning, we explored taste, sight, smell, touch and hearing.
For taste, we baked lovely cookies. For sight, we enjoyed a Puppet Show. For smell, we discovered the scent of coffee, vinegar, and perfume. We did not like the vinegar, it made us pull a funny face.
For touch, we played with playdoh and gloop and for hearing, we listened to classical music, and we really enjoyed and made us feel very relaxed.
Our children love dinosaurs and we loved learning about how they live millions of years ago. We made fossils and bones out of salt dough and enjoying our Dinosaur themed storybooks.
