Happy new year to all our parents and children and welcome to our first newsletter of 2020.

It was lovely to see all the children coming back after their Christmas break all refreshed and happy. Our older children were very excited to tell us all about their lovely festive holiday break with their family and friends, and all the lovely gifts they received.

Our new year has started with a jam packed curriculum, full of learning and fun. We enjoyed lots of activities exploring our five senses, and learned about the impacts of pollution and the importance of recycling.

We also celebrated Chinese New Year too and made some lovely arts and crafts for this festive event.

Here is a breakdown of what we got up it, and some photos too.

As of February, our newsletters will be available and distributed to parents every two months. So the next newsletter for Clontarf will be the March edition, then May, and so on. Thank you and we look forward to continuing to share all our news and stories with you through our newsletters.

In the meantime, we hope you enjoy this read, and don’t forget to follow us on Facebook and   Instagram, (links below).

Many thanks,

Sarah

Sarah Spencer —Crèche Manager

Baby Room News

All of our babies were ready to start the new year with smiles and giggles.

We started off by doing some new years art & crafts.

Then we had some messy play using jelly. At first, they were cautious about touching the jelly but once they felt comfortable, they had so much fun and this was a nice way to develop their sensorial skills.

We had a superhero/princess day and our babies all looked amazing in their costumes and super cute!

As the month finished, we welcomed five new babies to our room. We can’t wait to help them with their development and have a lot of fun with them.

We also wish the best of luck to our babies who are taken the next step and moving up to the wobbler room.

 

Wobbler Room News

This month we had a lot of fun!

We were learning all about the circus. We made lots of arts & crafts for this like our paper plate clowns which we used spaghetti to make their hair, crepe paper to make clown ties, a huge clown made from our handprints and also decorated our Wobbler Room door like the entrance of a real circus.

We love singing songs, so we began singing a new song called “traffic lights” and made traffic lights by painting paper plates green, red and orange. We also made small traffic lights with pompoms and lollipop sticks. Linked to this topic we also have an interest in wheels on our toys which led to us making motorcycles with our footprints.

Our favourite event was the Superhero and Princess Day. We looked great in our costumes and had a lot of dancing and games and making our own princess crowns.

We have been doing some exercises this month also with a yoga class and some other indoor exercises with our climbing blocks. We also made some emotion plates using different colour paints or the paper plates.

Senior Wobbler Room:

The beginning of this new year has started off with so much fun!

Body parts: we learned about what our bodies can do and what we can do by ourselves. We sang some relative songs about the body (head, shoulders, knees and toes) and (fingers and toes). We also read books about the body.

Circus: We loved learning about the circus and what to see in a circus, (animals, clowns and trapeze artists) and we made some clown art also with paper plates.

Superhero/princess Day: We spent the day being princesses in a magical castle and superheroes helping to save the classroom from danger. Our costumes looked amazing and we made some crowns for our princesses too.

Sensorial Play: We wanted to learn about our emotions and focused on calm/relax emotion which led to us making our sensorial bottles which had a mix of paint, oil, glitter and pompoms.

 

Toddler Room News

We have had a very busy January here in our toddler room.

New Year 2020:

To celebrate the new year we made some lovely 2020 pictures to hang in our classroom.

Superhero/Princess Day:

We loved dressing up in our costumes for this day. Our wonderful superheroes made sure we were safe, and our beautiful princesses also had a lovely tea party.

Supermarket:

One of our toddlers told us all about going to the supermarket with his mammy so we decided to set up our own supermarket in our room transforming our kitchen area into “Links Market”, the children had jobs of being a cashier, a customer and a delivery driver.

Love for Australia Day:

We decided to raise some awareness while also giving the children some knowledge about some of the beautiful Australian animals by creating some arts & crafts koala’s and kangaroos.

Chinese New Year:

For Chinese New Year we created some lanterns and a dragon which are typical items during this celebration.

 

Preschool Room 1 & 2

Preschool 1

After a very busy Christmas our preschool class had so much to tell us!

  • What Santa brought for them
  • What they done during Christmas
  • What their favourite new toy was

They drew pictures of them playing with their new toys to show their friends.

Weather:

Our class love to look out the window and tell their friends and teachers what the weather is like so we made a weather mural on the window in which they can tell us the weather by creating it on the window.

Superhero/Princess Day:

For this day we made amazing superhero masks and beautiful crowns for our princesses. We all had some cool costumes and some very pretty ones too!

Human skeleton:

We made a skeleton with paper plates and made an x-ray by using white paint handprints and cotton ear buds.

Gross motor skills:

We are learning the alphabet and decided to make it fun by hiding the letters in our sandpit and the children had to try to find them. We also sang the alphabet song. We gave them their names spelled out and gave them their name on single pieces of paper with letters from their name on them to see if they could put them into the correct place.

5 Senses:

We spoke about our 5 senses and tasted some different flavours, listened to different sounds, looked at pictures of objects and smelled different scents. We also made a movable face for the children to put the ears, mouth, nose and eyes on.

Chinese New Year:

We spoke about this and made some Chinese lanterns which are a traditional object during Chinese New Year.

We also had 2 birthdays this month and made birthday crowns for them and sang happy birthday and had a dance party too!

Preschool 2

After last month’s build-up to Christmas and the excitement on the children’s faces, we knew they would have a lot to tell us once creche had started again and we couldn’t wait to hear what they had to tell us!

We all sat around the table and took turns telling everyone what Santa had brought them and what their new favourite toy is to play with.

Skeleton:

We learned all about the skeleton and created a big skeleton with the cardboard poles to hang from our window and learned “the skeleton dance” which described the bones and what their connected to while also having fun wiggling about.

Welcome Wall:

We were so excited to welcome all our new friends who moved into our room recently, so we decided to make a welcome wall by hanging some gloves on our art wall on a line with all our children’s names on them. We are so excited to be part of our new children’s development and have a lot of fun with them.

Puppet show birthday bash:

As our children have been very fond in our puppet show’s we decided to make our main puppet “ziggles” turn 4 this month and had a big birthday party for him which we sang, danced and baked some beautiful hand cookies for ziggles (since he is a hand puppet) The children really loved this day!

Senses:

We were learning about our senses this month and made some lovely texture tests for our children to feel the difference between them.

We also had a sound test for our children to guess what sound they could hear without seeing it.

We also done a taste test were the children closed their eyes and had to guess what the food was they were tasting (all the foods were quite tasty)