Celebrations of Culture & Kindness
What a busy four weeks we have had in crèche – and what fun too.
Celebrations included St Patrick’s Day, Easter, and we enjoyed themed events such as National Pet Day, caring for our pets and Gardening Day.
We are delighted to welcome back all of our children and we are having such fun 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 over the last four weeks . Susan, our Chef, based in Links Clontarf has also shared a recipe for one of our children’s all time favourite dinners, Beef Stroganoff!
Just a note to say that our Baby Rooms are very close to capacity in all of our crèches for 2021 and into 2022 so we would like to advise any parents that might be expecting and if you require any sibling places, please enrol as soon as possible. Application forms are available from us or you can also contact Kim from our Admissions Team on kim.jones@linkschildcare.ie.
Our next newsletter for you will be in four weeks time, in the middle of May, where we will share more news with you on what our children have been doing.
Take Care.
Elaine Dunne – Crèche Manager
Activities from our Baby Room
Our Babies are always encouraged to express themselves through dancing, singing, playing instruments. We love creating new instruments too.
We used music from different parts of the world and we made maraca drums with cans, balloons, chickpeas and rice. We also used parts of the musical instruments for
painting. Finally they explored silence and noise and slow and fast rhythm while we were moving across the room.
We painted and decorated Easter eggs and our class Bunny. On the other hand, we also kept in mind our children’s interest in hiding and seeking for different toys and objects.
They really enjoy putting objects under pillows, chairs and inside bags and boxes.
So we took the chance to play hide and seek in our room and to hide different Easter items, including our Easter bunny and we looked for them in our room.
In addition, we explored different Easter elements like plastic flowers, animal eggs toys, chicken toys. Each item was put into a different box, and our babies took them in
and out of the boxes. They enjoyed listening and dancing to songs about Spring and Easter and pretending to be rabbits hopping and going on an Easter egg hunt.
Our babies enjoyed touching and playing with our Easter eggs and plastic balls, so we organized activities related to this interest. As well as this, we were learning about the Moon as it has a circular shape. We saw pictures of the moon and listened to songs and poems about this topic.
They explored and played with grey and white balls and they tried to put yellow balls, representing the Moon, inside of a box with holes and painted like the universe view. In
addition, they practised different ball sports with their friends from the Toddler Room, like football, tennis, basketball. And finally, they painted a full moon with a
mixture of white paint and flour and they used a ball for making craters.
Our children enjoyed sticking different materials and removing them as it is an activity they really like to do. The children used adhesive tape, glue, contact paper and Velcro
for this activity.
They created a magical decoration in our room based on the fairy tale “The Three Little Pigs”. And they listened to the story and some songs about the fairy tale and made the
main characters and the house.
Tales from our Wobbler and Toddler Rooms
In March we enjoyed the topic all about gardening and mini beasts.
We celebrated Gardening Day and learned about bees, flies, and insects. We made our own bees using empty paper rolls and painted them. We also made insects with our
painted footprints and found a ladybug in our class. We took care of the ladybug and we named it Lady.
The last week of March we learned about experiments. We saw some videos and finally we decided to do a volcano experiment.
We built it with an empty water bottle and a mix of glue, paper and water to make paper mache. The children painted it and when it was ready we made it explode using baking soda and vinegar. They loved this experiment. We also celebrated the Easter Egg Raffle for our Educarers and we did a lot of Easter decorations and activities including our Easter Egg Hunt.
The first week of April we focused on outdoor activities. We learned about basketball, football and tennis. After watching how to play basketball the children painted their very own basketball balls, and we made our own basket to play with in the garden.
For football we painted our feet kicking a football and we built our very own goal with a big box to play with it in the garden. Finally we played some tennis in the garden and the children got to play with some real rackets.
Preschool Room News
Preschool 1
Our children were talking about going to the beach, so we decided to learn about it. They loved to make beach roleplay, swimming in the water, having picnics, and make castles
in the sand. They enjoyed water play with animals. We also made a beach collage painting with blue, green and yellow and colouring and stuck fishes and sea animals onto it too.
During the last week of March, Easter caught their attention. We made a lot of Easter art and craft like Easter baskets and Easter cards for our families. We went on an Easter egg hunt
and had a lot of fun looking for the eggs in the garden with their friends.
Our children were interested in travelling. They liked to pretend to travel to other parts of the world with a map (a book) and a suitcase (box). They made a collage of the places
where they can go on holidays (they can go to the beach, to the mountains; they can go skiing, camping). The children also made an Airport role-play. They painted a box in black
(the “airport conveyor machine”) and we printed some “passports” and airplane tickets. One of the children was the pilot, the other the air hostess and the others the travellers.
They had a lot of fun playing this and their imagination was amazing.
The children also learned about different countries, especially Europe. They painted flags of the countries of Europe, and they made and learned about the things that represent the countries, such as the blue Mosque in Turkey, the red bus in London, pizza in Italy and the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
Preschool 2
Our Pre-school 2 children loved learning all about rainbows. We learned about the colours of the rainbow and how rainbows are made. We made an experiment where the children watched how a rainbow could appear, with water, crepe paper and colours. We made games where we needed to guess the order of the colours and memorize them, also everybody painted a rainbow of their own. They used this activity as an opportunity to practice some writing. They did this by writing their names in the middle of their rainbow.
Easter was lots of fun. We enjoyed art activities which included painting, colouring and gluing. We decorated the classroom door, made our very own Easter eggs and painted Easter baskets for us to use during our Easter Egg hunt. We also took part in an amazing Easter egg hunt, where we went to the playground to find some chocolate eggs and had a very fun time all together as a class. The children were so happy with getting to bring some Easter treats home.
