February was cold, wet and stormy, but it was full of fun activities and a fantastic atmosphere in our crèche in Drumcondra.
Our children have learned so much through our events and monthly themes carried out in February. It has been a wonderful opportunity to show appreciation for people we love during the course of the month, with our St Valentines Day themed activities.
We also learned lots about the life cycle of various inserts and animals, such as frogs and butterflies.
Just a note to say that our baby rooms are nearing capacity in all of our creches for 2020 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 (Creche Managers) or you can also contact Kim from our Admissions Team on kim.jones@linkschildcare.ie.
The next newsletter for Drumcondra will be the April issue. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy reading the February newsletter and check out some pictures from the month.
Don’t forget to follow us on Facebook and Instagram.
Best Wishes,
Emer & Sarah
Crèche Managers
Baby Room News
The Baby Room has been busy this month. They have welcomed new friends into the class and our Educarers have been planning lovely activities to keep our babies engaged and interested.
We loved our sensory play, exploring different textures such as jelly, coconut and rice crispies. We also made some sea animals during arts and crafts and loved looking at our moon and stars books.
It was a month of love, as we marked St Valentines Day and used our handprints to make our mums & dads cards. As the snow made an appearance, we made snowmen out of coconuts and made cookies for the first time too whilst celebrating Peters 1st birthday.
Wobbler Room News
It was such fun as we focused on our Circus theme. We practised juggling with balls and created a class clown and painted bow ties on it.
Our wobblers are good are expressing their various forms of emotions, so we decided to learn more about this through painting different faces of emotions and talking about when we feel happy and when we feel sad.
St Valentine’s Day was very special as we made some gifts for our parents using our hands and feet. We did stamping of paint with our hands and feet and stuck lots of glitter on our cards too.
We explored the family and looked at our home corner and played with different toys for role play.
Toddler Room News
For our Circus theme, our toddlers made a crown with their hands and a class clown for the wall. We put a red nose on to make a clown face and we all found this very funny.
For St. Valentine’s Day we made hearts with our hands and created beautiful presents for our families and staff. We learned about the word ‘Love’. We played with valentine’s sensory boxes, which were full of different textures and had pink playdough.
For Spring Week we made frogs with our hands and flowers for the wall. We created bees and ladybugs with our feet! We did a group picture of the sun and a tree to represent the changing weather.
We love exploring colours, and we have started making a rainbow with handprints and talking about colours of the rainbow. We will be learning how to say the colours soon.
Preschool Room News
Our preschool children have been learning, creating and practicing with instruments, and we looked at instruments from around the world and their sounds. We got to practice some beats and use them to shake, bang and make music. We made a guitar out of recycled boxes, a drum and shakers too and they can all be seen in our music corner.
We have been looking at the four seasons, especially Spring and we have been learning about the changes in the weather. We made rainbows, rain drops, umbrellas and flowers. We did a leaf hunt in the garden and learned about the life cycle of animals such as butterflies and chicks.
St Valentine’s Day was very special. The class had a valentines themed sensory tray to explore with. They also created beautiful artwork to take home and give to their special person. We talked about love, family and friends. We created hearts using paint and lots of glitter! We baked cookies for everyone for a Valentines treat!
We have introduced our Superstar awards and have been encouraging the children to be kind to each other and help when tidying up etc to achieve these awards.
We also have Super Helper cards that our friends have been using and every day we have two helpers to help with serving dinner and tea. The children are really enjoying the responsibility!
In our Preschool 2 Rooms and Afterschool Rooms, we have been having such fun learning all about the Life Cycles. We learned about the Butterfly, we did individual crafts and used their fine motor skills to manipulate the materials. We looked at books about the lifecycle of the frog and created a mural for the class. We built a representation of the lifecycle using playdough.
For Prehistoric times learning we made a group mural in relation to cave paintings, Individual crafts making torches and exploring the caves with torches. We had a great time discussing how they used to build fires for light and heat. We read the ‘Ice Age’ and we did a big ‘Mamut’.
For our Jungle theme, we turned PS2 into a jungle! We learned about animals from the jungle and talked about their colours, shapes, how they move, what they ate. We created an escape room called Frankie’s box; the children had to find keys in order to help the animals escape from the jungle.
We celebrated St. Valentine’s Day and created beautiful crafts for our families. We talked about why Valentines is special and how to say, “I love You”.
In the garden/Spring We explored animals from the garden like ladybirds and talked about plants trees and flowers of the garden. We talked about Spring and how we see flowers growing and new leaves on the trees.
Oh boy did we enjoy Pancake Tuesday too!
