Welcome to our latest newsletter for Links Childcare Clonee, where we will be sharing our news and photos from February and March. In February, we celebrated St Valentines Day, Recycling Day, our learning all about frogs and butterflies too. World Book Day at the start of March was lovely and we had such fun dressing up and reading with all our friends and Educarers.
Unfortunately, with March being cut short for us all in crèche, we didn’t get the chance to finish up our activities that we had planned for the rest of the month.
We hope our children have been able to do a bit of the curriculum with the children at home through the information we have shared with parents recently?
We have also been working on lots of videos from all of our crèches, put together by our Educarers, Managers and Chefs, and shared with you all via our Links Childcare Facebook and Instagram social pages. If you and your children have been following them, we hope you have enjoyed them all. And if you are trying any of the experiments or recipes out, and would like to share them with us, we would love to see them also. Please tag us using the hashtag #LinksLearningThroughPlay on your posts, or email them to me, and I will share them with the team.
Our social links are below for Facebook and Instagram, if you would like to take a look.
For now, on behalf of the Clonee team, we wish you well and we would like to say a big hello to all our children. We cannot wait to see all our children again very soon in crèche.
Please keep safe, wash your hands and enjoy this home time with your children as best as we all can.
Best Wishes,
Leyre
Crèche Manager
Baby Room News
In February, we were delighted to open up our Baby Room again in Clonee and we welcomed our new babies Edward, Amoha and Olivia.
At the start of February, our theme was all about Spring time and the things associated with this season. We made flower prints, bees and painted suns with paint on our feet and hands. We also enjoyed some messy paint and enjoyed painting with yellow, blue and white paint. Mixing colours to create green was fun and we used all these wonderful creations to decorate our doors in the Baby Room.
We made a family wall with hand and foot prints to stick some family photos, so that way the babies can see them whenever they want.
We celebrated St. Valentine’s Day, and we made beautiful cards for our families. We stamped foot prints into a heart shapes and had some messy paint in the inside. Edward and Olivia made them with all their love!
For the week of the 17th we learned about colours. We painted some water plant filters and made a lovely display in the room. We had some messy paint on the floor without clothes, babies were so curious about it, and we painted in purple and white and we used it to decorate the cot room. We made a rainbow with hand prints too.
Also for the last two weeks of February we have been working with sensory toys like feathers, sensory bottles, different types of papers and lights. We have been working with our babies and their gross motor skills with some dancing, standing up, crawling and trying to move arms to clap hands and say hello and ‘bye-bye’ with them.
In the month of March our babies were not in for the first week and on the second week we welcomed Amoha to our classroom, and we learned all about Wild Animals. We made some zebras, polar bears and rhinos painting with our hands and adding eyes.
We were playing with the animal toys to improve the knowledge about the names of the wild animals like “Tiger”, “Rhino”, “Elephant” and “Zebra”.
Wobbler & Toddler Room News
Our themes during February included Spring, colours and baby animals.
During the start of the month, we learned about colours. We did a lot of activities through painting and reading to enhance our learning. We did free painting to hang on the windows, we read the colour books and listened and danced to some colour songs. We used flashcards to learn the names of all the colours. Together we painted a big rainbow with our hands. And finally we made a roulette with all the colours and we painted some tweezers of these colours. The idea of this game is that the children then have to take the tweezers and put it on the right colour on the roulette. The loved this game and it helped them to remember the colours too.
We dedicated the second week to spring. We did a big poster with free colouring and then we drew some bees, ladybugs and flowers with our fingerprints. We went to the garden to play on the grass, and we tried to find some insects. Finally we celebrated St Valentine´s Day, and we did some ladybugs where we drew hearts with our fingers. We also made bees with our feet and we wrote “bee my valentine” on hem to make cards for our families. We made more cards for all the families with a heart shape, where we put the children’s footprints to make the hearts.
The third week of February, we learned all about baby animals. We read our new animals books with textures during circle time. We did free painting to do a poster, and then we added some glitter and we painted some flowers with our feet and hands. We did frogs, we painted it with our fingers and we stuck little eyes on them. We learned all about the lifecycle of butterflies and we drew eggs and caterpillar and butterflies onto a page. Finally we drew a lion´s body with our handprints and his hair with a fork.
Our yoga classes with our Educarers have been great in improving our balance and our gross motor skills. We all fell in love with the Freeze Song, and we loved singing and dancing to it together. We are learning the numbers from 1 to 10 in English, and we are trying to learn it also in Spanish.
And we were delighted to welcome our new Educarer Carmen who joined us in the wobbler-toddler class.
During our time in crèche at the start of March we learned about books and wild animals.
We love reading books and we made our own book “The very hungry caterpillar”. Every day we made different pages, painting them all and decorating the pages according to the story. When the book was finished, we read it in the circle time and we loved it. On Thursday 5th was the Books World Day and some of the children came with costumes and brought their favourite books, so we spent the day reading and talking about them. On Friday we made a very nice sensory box and children are loving the sensory bottles.
The second week we learned about “The wild animals”. We decided to create a jungle painting a box, to be able to play in there with the animals. Then we did some giraffes with our hands, parrots with our feet and hands and tigers with our hands.
Preschool Room 1 News
We started the month of February talking about the weather. The children were interested in how fast the sky is getting dark in the afternoon as well as in the changes of time and in the rainbow so was the perfect moment to have a little chat about it. Also the children made a lot of crafts about the weather such as a sun with paper and glue, a cloud mobile. They made rainbows with their handprints too. They like to see the rainbow and say the name of the colours.
They learned a song about the weather and they like to sing it over and over again. We also celebrated National Bird Day so we talked about the importance of birds and made a baby bird and a nest craft.
The second week of February we had a great topic of interest—dinosaurs! The children love role play and pretended to be dinosaurs; moving and behaving like them. They like a book we have about dinosaurs and we read this a lot. We all learned about the different kinds of dinosaurs and some of their main characteristics. The children made different kinds of dinosaurs using different materials. They made dinosaurs with their hand prints. They played messy play with sand, adding some dinosaurs in the mix too, and they had a lot of fun.
For St Valentine´s Day the children decorates a heart with paint and glitter and they gave them to their parents, very loving.
This month we also learned about flowers and animals and about animals that arrive during spring time, like bee, ladybugs, frogs and butterflies. We spend the week making these animals using different materials and techniques. We painted our butterflies and frogs, and made flowers with crepe paper, ladybugs and bees with our handprints and footprints and many other things. Also they learned about the lifecycle of butterfly and frogs with the help of the book “The very hungry caterpillar” and the children enjoyed some role-play about this lifecycle.
We did some t-short decorating too and the children brought in white t-shirts and they decorate it. The most popular drawing for t-shirts were flowers and insects accompanied by a huge sun. They really enjoyed this activity.
During the month of March we were talking about things that they can find in the garden. The children were very interesting in the insects that they found in the garden and we had a little chat about it. They made some arts and crafts activities such as spring trees with silk paper and glue and flowers with their feet. Furthermore they made bees and ladybirds with their handprints.
Family is, of course, very important to us, so we decided to make fantastic family portraits choosing their favourite colours for the frames. We celebrated World Book Day and they brought their favourite book to show to their class mate. We read the books and also they coloured a bookmark.
In March they also learned about the zoo. In class we read some books about animals and the children learned a Spanish song about zoo animals. Also they made some crafts about animals that they can see in the zoo. They made elephants and a giraffe with their handprint and they made a lion with a roll of paper. The children were very interesting in showing us how big and tall they are, and they measured themselves and their friends to see how tall they all are.
Furthermore they made towers with blocks and Lego and they compared their tower heights.
Preschool Room 2 & Afterschool News
February and the start of March have been a fun and exciting learning experience for the children.
We have been learning about dinosaurs, the life cycle of frogs and butterflies and much more.
In the first week the children learnt about dinosaurs. They painted a T-Rex using their foot print. They made a dinosaur card. They used paper plates and old toilet paper rolls to make a dinosaur that stands up. We learnt all about different kinds of dinosaurs by reading our two dinosaur books which have lots of fun facts about dinosaurs. The children really enjoyed this topic as its something that they are very interested in .
We also learnt about spring. As the weather is still quite cold we haven’t been seeing the leaves grow back on the trees yet. We learnt about spring animals and about the change in weather and daylight. The children made a spring card and made bees and ladybirds using their finger prints. We also made a bee and ladybird craft using paper plates which is on display in our creche. The children also learnt about rain and rainbows and they coloured in their own picture of a rainbow with the colours they wanted.
We also celebrated St Valentines Day, and the children made lovely cards to their valentines to bring home and they turned out lovely. We discussed why we celebrate St Valentines Day and why we love the people we do.
The children really enjoy role play activities and they have been especially interested in the home corner recently. To extend on this we made a washing machine out of a cardboard box and we made two doll beds. We also updated our real life material section in the home corner for a new washing machine area. The children have also loved playing hair dressers and beauty artists so we have updated this area also with new make up brushes and mirrors etc.
Also this months we have learnt about the life cycle of a butterfly and a frog . We have read some new books based on butterflies and frogs which they children found interesting and we made our own life cycle of a frog and it is hung up on display in our classroom . We also made a spring box and made some butterflies and caterpillars to decorate it with, along with a pond that has frogspawn and frogs.
Before we broke up in March, we had a baking day where all the classes made some healthy treats to bring home. In pre-school 2 we made some oat banana cookies which the children really enjoyed . Its was great to teach them that treats can also be good for you if you make them yourself.
