A Spring in our Step
As we stepped into Spring at the start of February, it felt like there was a change in the air.
A change in the brightness of the day, with the evenings getting a little bit longer, and even a change in the growth around us, with
the little peaks of daffodils slowing emerging up from their sleepy roots.
It is a welcome change, and we are looking forward to much more that the Spring season brings to us.
Our children have loved being together again; learning about Spring, insects, colours and their favourite thing to play with – dinosaurs! We had enjoyed learning from each other too, and just all have fun together.
We are still missing all of our friends who have yet to return back to crèche yet with us, but we look forward to when that will be again. Hopefully very soon. In the meantime,
we hope our children at home have been enjoying the videos we have posted on our Social Media Channels. And we hope they are enjoying some of our curriculum learning at home too.
Feel free to share any activities you have been enjoying at home with us.
In this bi-monthly newsletter, we have shared some insight into the activities from each of our rooms, that all took place over the first two weeks in February.
Our next newsletter for you will be in four weeks time, in the middle of March, where we will share more news with you on what our children have been doing. Stay Safe.
SARAH BELL – C R È C H E M A N A G E R
Activities from our Baby Room
Our babies had so much fun during our music sessions.
For Music and Sounds we made music shakers out of recycled bottles and added different materials like pasta, rice, lentils, oats and listened to the different sounds each one made.
We also compared the different sounds of instruments we have in the room like drums, xylophone, keyboard, and shakers.
We did some dancing to develop our gross motor skills and made our own sounds with our hands and feet. We also explored the sounds different toys make like the books compared to the blocks.
For our Colours theme we enjoyed making sensory bottles with different colours. As we shook them the colours mixed, and we saw new colours form.
Our children made an ‘artists’ display in our room for the babies to show off all their colourful creations and different animals they painted. We also did some sticking with colourful stickers.
We enjoyed a lovely sensory activity where our children picked paint colours and added them to a Ziplock bag and got to mix all the colours around with their fingers and draw pictures outside the bags.
We played with Lego and separated the different colours and made red, blue and yellow towers.
News from our Wobbler Room
Our wobblers were very interested Insects, so we explored the garden to see what insects we could find with a magnifying glass. We found a spider and made a little
house for him with some leaves.
For our ball games we had lots of fun painting, sticking and gluing to make a football and basketball nets out of recycled materials. We really enjoyed taking turns to play football and basketball with our friends.
We also enjoyed painting with Spring colours and making lovely flowers and displays for our room.
Tails from our Toddler Room
For our sensory play, we played with red and blue pasta shapes. We continued with our theme of the weather and experimented with fake snow. We also made a weather
chart that the children can refer to everyday.
Our Transport theme with our toddlers was great fun. They loved seeing the bin lorry outside, so we decided to look at different types of transport. They enjoyed making a road in the room and
having races with the cars on the road.
The Toddler Room Spring theme was all about colour and the weather. We looked at the weather in Spring and made spring decorations from our room. We found leaves in the garden
and used this to make a tree and we painted flowers.
St Valentine’s Day was celebrated by making a ‘tree of love’ in our room. We did this by cutting potatoes and using them as stamps for the paint.
Preschool Room Adventures
For our Life cycle of a butterfly, we learned the four stages of the butterfly life cycle (from the egg to the caterpillar, how they build a cocoon and eventually turn into a beautiful
butterfly. We created a display of these four stages with a cardboard box, leaves, pom poms and pipe cleaners.
We also learned about this life cycle through the story ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’. We made our own caterpillars with tissue paper and created butterflies by using our footprints
and paint to create butterfly wings and made a stamp with tinfoil for the body.
We also began to look at the life cycle of a frog. We have made some frogs from paper plates and read a new story ‘The frog on the Log’. We are also learning a new song called
‘5 green speckled frogs’. We have also enjoyed hopping like frogs in the garden.
For our Spring theme, we looked at how the weather changes in Spring and we see more leaves on the trees.
We found some leaves in the garden but couldn’t find any flowers just
yet. We made a Spring nature box, collecting materials in the garden which we will continue to build on throughout the month. We also made some sunflowers with crepe paper
and glue.
We enjoyed Balance Day when we played limbo and tried to balance on one foot or on the blocks.
For St Valentine’s Day we have made a post box for our valentines’ letters and will send nice notes to all our friends telling them how much we love them. We have also made a
photo-booth to take lots of lovely pictures. We can’t wait to make more Valentines art to send home to our mammy’s and daddy’s.
