Happy New Year to all our parents, guardians and children.
I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas together and I hope the new year brings health and happiness. As we face into our 3rd lockdown in Ireland, it may appear to be difficult to see a bright new year ahead, but I believe that, if we all work together, we can do this. We look forward to days in the future when we can welcome our parents and guardians back into our crèches, where you can physically witness all the amazing works of art that your children are doing to adorn our walls.
And where we can welcome you to special events like concerts again.
In this newsletter, we have shared some insight into the activities from each of our rooms, that all took place this month. It was really lovely to see our children and colleagues again, and to engage in so much fun and learning.
As we welcomed back some children to our crèches, we are missing our children who have not returned to us this month. Since the start of January, we have been adding daily videos on our Social Media Channels for our children at home to enjoy.
We hope our children have enjoyed them so far.
Activities from our Baby Room
In our Baby Room, we had a wonderful month exploring our senses. Our Educarers made a sensory board so the babies could explore different textures in a fun and
colourful way.
We painted our fingers & toes in colourful paint and made a beautiful poem for our Mammy’s & Daddy’s.
We created our very own teddy bears using paint on our fingertips. We clapped our hands while listening to Lourdes & Tania sing songs about teddies bears and Carla read us a
story about Goldilocks and the Three Bears.
As well as this, we sang songs about winter and we danced and moved our bodies.
To work on our motor skills, Lourdes created a motor skill circuit with the soft blocks so the babies could climb and crawl over.
The babies love playing with the musical instruments while listening to classical music.
News from our Wobbler Room
Welcome back to all our Wobblers. We also gave a warm welcome to Oisin & Adam, who joined our Wobbler Room.
Our wobblers made a poem with their handprints on it. They sang songs about their body parts ‘head shoulder knees and toe’ and made a clown out of recycled boxes for
their room. They also made clowns to bring home using their handprints and different sensorial materials.
They pretended to be different animals from the circus making their animal sounds etc. They read stories about
the circus and sang the song ‘Nellie the Elephant’.
Our children had such fun exploring the theme traffic lights. They sang the traffic light song and painted pictures of traffic lights using their handprints. They also explored the
three traffic light colours and our Educarers helped the children identify other things in their room with the traffic light colours.
Exploring nature and textures was a huge interest for our children. Ana & Angie helped them identify different textures in their room and in their garden. They loved
collecting and feeling the texture of the wet leaves from the garden. Iris gathered some of the wet leaves and let them dry overnight so the children could feel the texture of the
dry leaves.
Fit & Fun day was spent doing lots of races in the garden while singing their marching song. Maria did some yoga with her group.
On the rainy days we did lots of painting and also made an obstacle course from the soft blocks in the room to help improve our balance & gross motor skills.
What Have Our Toddlers Been Up To?
Our toddlers enjoyed different art activities with paint, using their fingers & toes. We made finger puppets and sang the song ‘Family Finger’.
Macarena & Sarai did different activities relating to the traffic lights. They spoke about the three colours and how to cross the road carefully. They played the traffic light
game, so the children got to understand the different colours of traffic lights in a fun & meaningful way.
For our Circus theme, we learned about the different circus animals, clowns, and Circus acrobats. We had our very own Magic Show and tried some juggling too.
This month we changed our home corner into a Hair & Beauty salon and took turns giving people some beauty treatments.
To welcome our new friends who joined us from the Wobbler Room, we had a Friendship Day to get to know our new friends. We did some activities about our solar system
and read stories/sang songs about the moon and the stars. We also created planets, the moon, stars and rockets for our room walls.
Preschool Room Adventures
We had a busy start to the new year, exploring the themes of Five Senses, the Human Body and Recycling as part of our monthly curriculum.
Five Senses:
Our Educarers decided to explore the children’s sense of taste & smell through a fun activity.
They did a blindfold challenge and the children got to guess which foods they were eating by the taste, smell texture of the foods.
They also created a mystery box and had to guess which objects where inside the box while blind folded. This was lots of fun.
Human Body:
For the human body, we talked about our skeleton and created some skeleton bones using paper plates. We sang songs and did a skeleton dance.
We are very interested in trains, so Giorgia created some train arts & crafts and we did some role play activities.
Recycling:
We created a recycling box and collected materials from our room and played a game in which the children learned which materials were recyclable and which ones were not.
Other Activities:
For Fit & Fun Day, we made two bowling alleys out of recycled materials and had a great game of bowling with our friends. Ray did a Yoga class with us and we practiced
standing on one foot and our breathing exercises too. Ana brought in a torch and did some shadow/reflection activities on the wall by cutting out some shapes and
shining the torch on them the children got to guess the shapes.
Ray made a paper boat and told them a story about ‘Storm Sailing’. It is a story about a sailor who does not listen and gets himself in a little pickle. The story has many characters
which the children role played out and it teaches them about the dangers of water and how to keep safe. In the end the sailor loses his t-shirt but as they tear parts of the boat off when it crashes off the waves, Ray folds out the paper boat the sailor’s t-shirt is revealed.
