We have had such fun over the past three months, as we enjoyed the rest of the summer and the nice sunshine in July and August.
We took advantage of the nice weather outdoors and played lots of games and had fun with our friends in the fresh air.
In September, we welcomed lots of new children to our rooms and we have formed some lovely new friendships together.
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
September. We have also shared some photos with you from our July & August activities. We hope you enjoying browsing through them.
Elaine Dunne – Crèche Manager
July Activities
August Activities
Activities from our Baby & Wobbler Rooms
Babies love exploring new textures and their attention is easily caught by bright colours and lights, that’s why our activities have been related to this interest during last week.
First, they touched and played with several materials that are attractive to them like dough, glue, paint, different kinds of paper, clothing, wool, pompoms, feathers…
They could explore them freely and they were able to find new purposes for them.
On the other hand, they could experience darkness and light. For example, I closed our curtains, and I turned the light on and off in our room. Furthermore, the children played with their shadows and other objects’ shadows. And finally, they watched a shadow puppet show.
They enjoyed the activities a lot and had new experiences.
Our children enjoy putting toys inside and outside of different boxes. Some of them even took part in the cleaning up of the room while I sang the “Clean up song” to encourage them to do it. And they put cars and sensory toys inside their containers. For that reason, all the following week activities were about these actions.
I brought different sized boxes and they explored them. They touched, moved and opened them and tried to get inside them.
Afterwards, the boxes were filled with lots of different objects, so they were interested in seeing what was inside.
Later, I made some holes in a box and I showed them how to insert balls in it. Many of them could do it without help.
Furthermore, we used one lid of a box like a hill for the balls which ended inside of another container. They loved dropping balls and seeing them coming down.
At the end, we also used the boxes to play music by moving them as they were filled with objects and musical instruments.
They had lots of fun!
This month in baby/wobbler room we have been testing ourselves!
One day we went to the market, they were very happy walking around the isles with their baskets choosing the products that they wanted to buy.
We also have a psychomotricity activity; we were climbing a big mountain in the garden! They were really good in It, when they arrived at the top of the mountain they stood up and jumped to get down. They were very excited and proud of showing their motor skills.
In the baby/wobbler room we have discovered more about friendship.
The room is getting busier with all our new friends!
We wanted to give them a warm welcome, so we decided to know more about friendship and our new friends.
We read ‘Little Elephant’ book, this book is about friendship, we were painting our favourite characters!
We were painting little Elephant and the penguin with the sponges, our little boys and girls were really pleasure with the activity, they love the texture and the feeling of the paint running in the sponges.
We also stamped our hands to make the cat and the rabbit of the story.
They really enjoyed the activity; they were messing a lot with the paint! They found It funny, and they were smiling during the activity all the time.
We also went on a treasure hunt! Our children chose some toys, and we hide them all around the class, they were good seekers, they made a good team to find the objects!
We have discovered more about ourselves and we made new friends this week.
Pre-School & After-School Room News
Preschool 1 & Toddler
In Preschool 1 we couldn’t wait any more to meet our new friends and teachers. We are all big boys and girls now and we are excited with all the things we are going to learn in our new class. That’s why the first week we worked on the topic “Welcome to school.”
We have chosen a new name for the class: superheroes and we have personalised the class, based on this topic. We have prepared a wall with the birthdays so we all will be able to know when the next birthday is. We have decorated the board with the rules of the class, our daily routine and the weather information. We have also added a picture that the children have drawn of their favourite thing/place so they could cheer them up when they see it and they love the idea.
We decided to create one tablecloth for each child. We gave them paper and they coloured it with crayons and painted it with paint, when they had finished, we put their names and laminated it.
Finally, we made a “photo booth” with a big box that said, “Welcome to Preschool 1”. We had a good time painting it and taking alot of photos and selfies when it was finished. All the children had fun and loved the activity.
We had a very good first week of school and we are ready to learn together while developing our friendship and our skills.
The children have been very excited this week working on this topic. They have made their own chef hats, they have drawn a picture of their favourite food and we have played a game which consisted of one person keeping the food and the others saying different foods, in this way the child who keeps the food has to say from 1 to 10 how much they like the food and that numberwill be the number of steps they have to take to get home.
Thanks to this topic we have been able to get to know all our new friends a little bit better.
During this week we have drawn a picture of our favourite transport, we have also learnt a song about cars, and we have played with the different transport toys that we have in class.
We have also played with all the new toys, as we are very happy in our new class.
Also, as this week was Grandparents’ Day, we have made a little letter to our grandparents in which we tell them how much wel ove them and a poster of a tree on which we have each left our mark.
We also got to watch some of our friend’s grandparents do some lovely videos for us.
Finally, we have worked on emotions, identifying them and marking each one with a colour.
Now we know how we feel and where we come from and we are very happy with our new class!
Preschool 2 & After-school
This week in PS1, the topic was Marvel, and our short-term topic was “Pirates, sailors and animals over the deep blue sea”, because there’s a book about sharks which they love to read time after time.
We’ve learnt that “baby-sharks” are called “pups”, that they’re made out of cartilage and even that some sharks don’t have teeth.
Their favourite song this week was one about a Pirate boat, called “over the deep blue sea”. Alen loved it and he was singing it even when it wasn’t on.
We made pirate hats, pirate patches and drew boats with our hands. Even we made a pirate telescope out of a can of pringles; we also made jelly fishes that will hang on our boards made out of coloured paper.
And as the main topic was marvel, we also made “superhero” capes with bin bags. They painted them colourful.
Our children love painting. We found out that Alex’s favourite superhero was Hulk, and Sadie’s Wonder woman…
But as they loved playing dramatic super heroes games, and talking about magic and powers and all of this, we had a chat at the end of the week where we decided to set up our class for next year as a superhero headquarters!
And finally, on Friday (our special day for messing all around) we had a “pirate treasure hunt” day: First of all, they picked their favourite toy in the whole class, and I hid it; Then they had to make their own treasure map AND EVEN to colour a Parrot… but the real craic begun with the sand pitch, where I had hid the toys.
After they found all the toys, they just kept playing free sand games for around 40 minutes.
We’ve been working in the topic of the body and the movement… trying all week to prove ourselves.
We made a human kids-body, painted in a box, with a sticky-stick parts (eyes, mouth, nose, ears…) and arms, legs, feet & head that can move.
Kids loved making it so much that we decided to keep it in our new room and using it for the coming seasonal events.
Also, we got new paints, good for mixing colours, and based on the kids interests we did a “mixing colours day “and made an amazing picture that we used, later, to make decorations for a farewell party.
At garden time we had sports time: all street games and popular games (from Spain & Ireland) as: bulldog, piggy in the middle, hotchpot… and even an obstacle race using “hoppy hoops” (as one of our kids called them).
The song of our week was “head shoulders knees & toes”
The children really enjoyed having sports & new materials for playing outside.
