As the Autumn season truly kicked in, we enjoyed lots of lovely fun learning. We loved learning about the Farm, Autumn colours and materials and
transport too. We celebrated Halloween towards the end of the month with lots of Halloween arts and crafts, games and Dress Up Days.
Our children also loved Pet Day and learning all about different world cuisines during World Food Day. During Beep Beep Day and Road Safety
Week, we did lots of games and activities to help us learn about the importance of road safety.
As always, 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 October. We
hope you enjoying browsing through them.
Elaine Dunne – Crèche Manager
Activities from our Baby & Wobbler Room
Emotions are a great part of our lives and it is very important to educate about them from an early age. Our babies love the “If you are happy” song, among other songs about feelings, and they can perform some of the gestures and movements related to them. They also seem very interested in facial expressions of emotions as they pay a lot of attention when their Educarers express them themselves while singing telling stories. For that reason, we prepared activities about feelings and the first one was singing several songs, such as:
“If you are happy”
“Can you make a happy face?”
“This is a happy face”
“Everything is going to be alright”
“Feelings. Emotions songs”
They were very focused on their performance, and they clapped and moved their arms and bodies while the songs were played.
Following this, we sat down in front of our mirror and showed them expressions with our faces and body language -happy, sad, angry, scared, sleepy, excited and silly. At the same time, the children were expressing their own emotions with their faces and bodies as happiness, surprise or caution during the activity.
The next activity was observing our book’s characters’ emotions, so we used books our finger puppets and were presented their feelings with the puppets’ movements and our voices. They were very interested in the story and showed happiness at the end when we clapped.
For representing the emotion of happiness, we painted a smiling face using their handprints and we also made emojis with their fingerprints. Our babies like touching paint and using it for exploring and expressing themselves, so they enjoyed the activity and observed with interest the result where we drew eyes and mouths in each hand and fingerprint.
This month in the Wobbler & Baby Room we have been learning more about taking care of our babies.
Our little boys and girls were really interested in the baby dolls, so we decided to show them more about the baby’s world.
On Monday we were washing the baby dolls that we have in the class, we had a messy play activity with water and soap. Our children were really excited with the activity, they were really happy and they enjoyed the activity a lot. They were very pleasant playing with the water, they liked to feel the water running on their fingers and hands as well!
We also have discovered more about the babies hygiene, we did a role play using the baby dolls. Our little boys and girls were the teachers for one day and they were cleaning the nappys of the dolls!
They liked this activity a lot. They were smiling happily during all the activity, they are really big kids!
We also painted a mural about the baby’s care, we stamped our feet to create the babies in their sleeping bags! We also stamped sponges in the paint for the cots and our little fingers for the shakers.
They enjoyed this technique a lot! They really like to press the sponges and feel the texture of the paint and also to stamp their own feet! They were laughing during the activity, most of them had tickles on their feet!
This month we also did lots of fun crafts for Halloween. The children painted their hands to make some Halloween crafts and decorations for the classroom. We also dung some Halloween songs which our children enjoyed. The children also loved playing with out magic potion sensory activity where they got messy with messy play and used some toy spiders to play in our activity. We loved our Halloween party and enjoyed lots of singing and dancing and games with our babies and wobblers.
Pre-School Room News
Preschool 1
We have enjoyed learning and exploring this month in the preschool room this month.
The children were interested in learning about school, so we discussed, and role played what a day in school is like. The children really enjoyed this and loved pretending to be teachers.
The theme for our class is Superheroes. Each child drew their favourite superhero and showed their friends. We learnt how to make superhero figures with the blocks and the children loved it. We love playing Simon Says and thanks to this we have learnt about our body parts. We have also opened the snack bar and the children love being able to get their bowls and their drink bottles and go and sit down and pick out the fruit they would like to eat. It encourages the children to be independent.
Last but not least, the children loved doing messy play with water and red glitter and the children put the toy fish into it. They loved imagining they were fish and swimming in the sea with them.
The second week in pre-school 1 we worked on the topic “Jobs” because the children were very interested in learning about the different trades. That’s why this week we have prepared each day a different stand with a different job. In each stand we have put the different toys that we had in the class related to that job for them to play with. Also, as For Halloween, we made different decorations for the class: a skeleton, ghosts, pumpkins and spiders with their spider webs. For Beep Beep Day we have made different crafts about road safety, and we made a zebra crossing, a traffic light. We even recreated what we have to do when we cross the street! To finish, we created an Autumn photocollage where we were able to take lots of photos of ourselves!
The third week the children were interested in learning about animals. For this we have carried out activities such as talking about the animals they know, we have imitated them, we have learned new animal songs, and even drawn different kinds of animals.
This month we also had ‘Pet Day’ where each one of us told us about their pet, what their name does together and together we have made a mural, which they love to see every day and again talk about their pets. The children who have pets, did a show and tell using a photo of their pet. The children who don’t have pets talked about their favourite animals and why.
We celebrated two birthdays in class by having a party for them.
What a fun week! PS1 has learned many things.
During the fourth week, the topic of learning was costumes and sounds, since Halloween was approaching and we were preparing for the big party.
We enjoyed different activities such as creating our superhero capes, masks with our hands or postcards to decorate the class. We also pretended to be witches, ghosts, zombies, pumpkins and more. Also, on Wednesday we celebrated International Day of Food! We learned the names of the cutlery and did a sensory activity with food and paint. We also discussed the different types of food that are eaten across the world. Finally, we had a small Halloween party for our ECCE children! We dressed up and we sung and danced a lot!
Preschool 2
During the first two weeks in October, we have been learning about Autumn. The children have been decorating the class with leaves by painting them, putting a new fall space and complementing it with the investigation of the insects that we can see in the fall. For this reason, based on the class books, we have seen the phases of the butterfly and we have gone out to the garden with the magnifying glasses to observe insects, we were lucky enough to be able to see a bumblebee up close.
Returning to the theme of the leaves, we have created a mural with the evolution that they have in autumn, the different phases of the colours, and also as I have already mentioned we have painted them with autumn colours , orange, brown, yellow and also them we have used to stamp them on paper.
We also learnt all about road safety during Beep Beep Day. We dedicated two days to road safety, playing games and activities making them participate in the importance that it has. We made some road safety signs and thought the children about the different signs that they may see while out walking. We also thought the children how to stop, look and listen before they cross the road and they should only cross the road with an adult.
The second week, our children found a book about science and liked it so much that we decide it will be our topic from Monday.
So, Monday we did our “experiment”: We put an egg in a cup with vinegar and closed it until Thursday. After this time it was suppose to bounce.
Teacher Lara asked the kids what they thought would happen… some of the answers were very clever: “the egg is going to hatch”; A chick chicken will come out”; “omelette”…
They smelled and touched the vinegar and saw the “bubbles” at the top of the cup.
Every day since Monday the first thing they children did was to go to the counter to check the egg… they were very happy and excited.
Finally on Thursday the egg was ready to bounce!!!!! All the children made a big circle.
We threw the egg and… it break, everybody was laughing!
We also did count activities with blocks, as an introduction to adding and weighting tiny toys on scales.
In the class, we have some weights (1, 5, 10 or 20 g) and a scale. The children just love making it go higher or lower… so this time we tried to make it equal.
We put some camels in on side and added 1grams pieces. That’s how we found out that a baby camel weighted just 7grams.
Once again, our children took the magnifier glasses outside to go on a big hunt, they wanted to catch a big one… we found a bee!!!
We also discovered that if you put the magnifier glass far from your face and look through it, you will see everything UPSIDEDOWN!!!
It was really good fun.
For Pet Day, everybody brought pictures of their animals, even teacher Tamara.
We talked a lot about them and about how we need to take care of all the animals.
In our class now we have a new corner; The Vet.
We made scrubs, a lovely mural with pictures and a vet bed for our dog “Fermin”.
We continued working on our Autumn topic, and brought some more leaves and conkers and chestnuts (that we called“hedgehogs”), and made a lovely Autumn box.
We used some of the leaves & conkers to make our Halloween decorations: witches, ghost, pumpkins.
For Halloween, we made decorations for our class, witches with our hand, ghosts, a mummy with paper and glue, spiders. We also learnt some Halloween songs, the children really loved the song, ‘I’m a witch, I’m a scary witch’.
The children were also enjoying doctors play role as we made a corner last week and they loved it. They dressed up like doctors and took care of each other. Also, we have been reading books about the human body, and we sang songs that were about our body parts.
We ended the month with a small Halloween party for all our children to enjoy.
