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
Sensory boxes are a great way for our babies or discover their different types of senses and textures. We made these for our babies and included things like feathers, bubble
wrap, pom poms and sponges. They also enjoyed sensory bags filled with water, gel and foam.
Our babies also loved chasing bubbles in the garden, whilst also practicing their crawling and walking at the same time too.
Our Educarers made a mystery box with soft textures and rough textures for them to explore and they painted on previously not discovered with new materials such a cotton
wool and felt.
For our Construction games, our babies enjoyed building towers with the cones in the garden, as well as Lego and wooden blocks. They also enjoyed painting and stamping with Lego and collecting cardboard boxes to make big castles. And we had such fun in the garden and found a few snails too.
News from our Wobbler Room
For our Fingers and Toes themed activities, we did lots of sensory games and explored new textures. The wobblers particularly liked exploring with paint, feathers, and coconut. We also made sensory gloves. We put different foods into the gloves like rice, Rice Krispies, ice and water, and our wobblers used their fingers to squash the gloves to
feel the different textures while also listening to the sounds each one made.
We just love exploring in our kitchen area and cooked some pasta and rice to play with. For our Construction themes we built a big road, using blocks for their cars.
Our Circus theme was such fun, as we learned about clowns, Circus animals and Circus tricks.
Welcome Daniel, Alice, Cillian and Dominik to our Wobbler Room, who were promoted from the Baby Room, and a warm welcome to Finn, who moved from Links Clontarf, to
our Wobbler Room in Links Drumcondra.
What Have Our Toddlers Been Up To?
Our toddlers loved learning about the Days of the week through our new songs and books.
We also talked about fruits and what our favourites are that we like to eat. We love puzzles so we decided to paint our favourite fruits and create our own puzzle from them. We
also enjoyed blind tasting our fruit snacks .
Our weather theme wad fun, as we explored the different types of weather and what clothes we need to wear for the rain/snow/sun. We painted pictures of all the different
types of weather to display in our room and learned to sing the ‘How’s the Weather Today’ song.
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:
For our Five Senses learning, we enjoyed lots of sensory play with lentils, water, pasta and playdoh. Our preschool children also made their own sensory board to explore. We
learned a new song about our senses and did food tasting test to explore our sense of taste.
Human Body:
Learning about the Human Body and Skeleton got us talking about our heartbeat and purses, and we took turns feeling each other’s pulses. We learned a new song about our bones
and made an ‘Xray’ with cotton buds to show what the bones in our hands look like.
We just adore Dinosaurs and made a dinosaur habitat with sticks and leaves collected in the garden and recycled a cardboard box. We also made dinosaur bones with Hanna
and went on a dinosaur hunt.
We also enjoyed doing science experiments with eggs and vinegar. The egg turned transparent after we left it in vinegar overnight. This was so exciting to see.
In Preschool 1 we welcomed Evie, Theo, Amelia, Jessie,Jonas, Eimear and Molly, who came from our Toddler Room.
