What a fun few months we have had.
We kick started the new year of 2022 with our New Years Resolutions and enjoyed exploring our 5 senses, the human body and the human skeleton, as well as the circus. Our children also loved National Puzzle Day and creating some very cool inventions during Inventors Day. In February, we celebrated Chinese New Year, St Valentines Day and enjoyed Balance Day and had so much fun for Carnival Day.
Keep an eye out on our Social Media Channels for photos of our daily activities.
In this newsletter, we have shared some insight into the activities from each of our rooms that has taken place during the month of January and February. We hope you enjoy browsing through them.
Sarah Bell – Crèche Manager
Activities from our Baby Room
When we came back from our Christmas holidays, we were very excited to see our friends and welcome the new babies to the room. During the holidays some of the children learned how to crawl and others how to sit on their own, they are growing so fast. Our topic this week is the body. We did lots of singing and dancing. The children loved “head, shoulders, knees and toes.” And “One little finger”. We were painting the different parts of our body and mixing the paint with our hands.
The children loved singing songs, so we decided to do music this week. We sang lots of songs and learned new ones. We also did some painting we made flowers for our “all about me” wall. We also played with lots of musical instruments like shakers, drums, and the xylophone, making up our own songs. The children really enjoyed this.
This week we focused on “imaginative play”. We were exploring our imagination through play, feeding our dolls with the plastic food, putting them to sleep in the pillows and singing them songs. We did lots of garden play exploring the leaves. We also made playdough and really enjoyed playing with it.
Our topic for this week was transport. The babies wanted to discover the different sounds they make, how they move and what they look like. We were reading books about transport and one about Thomas the tank engine and friends, they loved pressing the buttons and listening to the different sounds they made. We also painted a big box to make a car and we painted plates to make a train.
In February, we made different pictures and flowers by painting with our hands and mixing the different colours to create new ones. We loved getting messy and seeing the colours change.
We also built towers with blocks and organised them into all the red blocks and blue blocks etc. For the babies to see the different colours.
We used our colour tinted blocks and shone a light through to see the reflections and the different colours they made.
For our sounds, we listened to lots of music and did some dancing. We had lots of fun clapping our hand to the music. We loved using the xylophone, drums and rattles to see the different noises they made. We also enjoyed making sensory bottles with different materials and comparing the different sounds each one made.
For our shapes learning, we did sensory play with paint and created different shapes with our art to display. We created shadows with our animals to see what shapes they would make on the floor. We also celebrated valentine’s day this week’s and made love hearts with our feet and cards to share with our families.
We did lots of sensory play this week in order to explore different textures. We painted rice into different colours and added them to bags to play with and explore. We also played with feathers and pom poms. We loved the feel of the feathers on our cheeks. We played with gloop and explored different material cut outs, some were soft and others were rough.
We also celebrated carnival this week and made masks by painting and gluing feathers.
Stories from our Wonderful Wobbler Room
For the first week we decided to focus on our body and its different parts. We took some sensorial toys to explore the feeling using our fingers and toes. We did some painting with our hands and feet to make some lovely art. Then we walked through different sensorial material, the children loved the feeling on their feet. For the sensorial material we used: Coconut, glitter, paper, paint, flour, water, and pom-poms. We also did playdough using different toys to make different shapes. We also sang a lot of songs describing the different parts of the body.
The wobblers love animals, they enjoy playing with the animal puzzles and toys we have in the classroom. So, this week we decided to focus on animals. We did a painting activity which the children loved painting their hands and then we drew a tail and a face on them, and they were going to be our pet! Then they were able to decorate them as they would like to add(glitter, coconut, Weetabix…). We did water play with the animals, showing them about sea life and having the animals swimming. For the other animals we put them on Weetabix. We song lots of songs related to animals, seeing what sounds they make and where they live.
The children love playing in the garden and exploring what they can find our there. So, this week we decided to look at nature. We created a game called “Call the jungle”, we went to the trees, and we called all the animals that live in the jungle, role playing that we were the animals. We then made a nature box filled with things the children found in the garden(Sticks, leaves, grass, stones.) we used these materials to paint with and make a flower.
We have very good helpers in our room! The children love to help each other with dressing, getting coats on and getting their stuff at home time. So, this week we looked at clothes. Firstly, we drew the clothes that we wear every day and decorated them. We used flashcards to improve on their vocabulary and discover new clothes. We were always asking the children what they were wearing and looking at all the different colours our clothes are too and how they feel. We also had lots of fun dressing our baby dolls.
We explored textures by sticking coconut, flour, pasta and feathers onto paper and cut them out to make our own puzzles to play with. We also enjoyed playing with our animal puzzles so we drew some pictures of the different animals to make more puzzles.
Our Wobblers love to play with construction toys and build different objects so we decided to create our own wobbler city. We did this by cutting out different shapes and sticking them together to make different buildings. We also brought our wooden blocks outside to build big tall towers in the garden.
We used our hands to make love hearts and decorate our room for St Valentine’s Day. We also used glitter to make red and pink decorations. We made red playdoh and heart shapes.
We also made cards with flowers for our families.
Our Wobblers love playing in the kitchen area and cooking food so we decided to look at the different types of food and be chefs for the week.
We made different types of fruit and vegetables to put on our board. We also explored different fruits at snack time, smelling each one before we had a taste.
We painted pasta and rice to add to the kitchen area and did sensory play with pasta and spaghetti to explore the textures of cooked and uncooked pasta. We also played with coconut and loved the smell.
Tales from our Toddler Room
Our toddlers were interested in animals. They enjoy knowing what the animals say, what they eat and where they live. We were doing some art to decorate our room with our favourite animals like lions, fish, and chickens.
The children were interested in the colours, the names of the colours and what happens if we mix two of them together. We were doing colourful activities, painting, doing playdough and guessing colours when we mix them.
Working with the colours made our toddlers notice that some colours can have meaning. They were interested in traffic lights and how to use them. We were doing roleplay activities where we showed them what happens when we see a greenlight and a red light. We drew our own traffic lights and played with them and the bikes in the garden.
Our toddlers love bubbles and it made them think of fish blowing bubbles under the sea. The children show an interest in finding out about fish, crabs, and all the different sea animals. We crafted our own sea animals to create our under the sea decorations for our room. We used materials like paint, glue, white tissue ad water. They really enjoyed the messy play with the water with the animals.
Our toddlers were interested in animals, water and baby shark. Our room were full of bubbles while we learned about Under the sea and all the animals that live in there. We were dancing baby shark surrounded by bubbles, we stick scales on our fishes, and we used lots of paint to create our own under the sea display to decorate our room.
The animal are still in our toddlers minds, but this time it was the turns of all the insects and bugs they see in the garden. We learnt all about where the insects live, the name of some of the insects and bugs we find in our garden (butterfly, ladybug, work, fly, snail) They had so much fun going on a bug hunt and doing arts about them.
The children were talking about cars, bins trucks and aeroplanes. It was time to work on Transport and craft our own ones out of different materials. Aeroplanes started to fly in our room and the children were all smiling singing wheels on the bus in our big wooden car. Also, we made our own Valentines cards for our lovely Mommies and Daddies.
All the children were dancing and singing with the songs that our educarers sing in the room. We were practicing our Nursery rhymes while we learnt about colours. All the previous activities showed that our toddlers enjoyed using colours, naming the colours,
and painting with them. They made lots of colourful activities to decorate the room and worked on our transition songs and prepared for our Carnival decorations.
Pre-School Room News
Preschool 1
After the holidays we welcomed lots of new friends to preschool, Mia, Luka, Siun, and Sid. This week we decided to focus on our senses, taking a different sense every day. For touch we played with lots of different sensorial materials: rice, paper, paint, playdough, water… We tried to describe what we could feel, introducing new vocabulary. For sight we looked at all the different colours there are around us, using paint. For hearing we made instruments, which made lots of different sounds. We also made all the different animal noises guessing what we were pretending to be. For smell and taste we were smelling and tasting our fruit and describing what it tastes like. We also tried lemon, sugar, and salt.
The children love building so this week we did a lot of construction. The children made their houses. We also played with a lot of Lego, getting creative making airplanes and rockets and boats. The children loved building big castle with the wooden blocks and role playing with the people.
This week we are looking at our bodies. We sang lots of songs like “head, shoulders, knees and toes”, “Dancing bones”, and the “Hokey Pokey”. For art we made a person and painted them. Then we made our own bodies sticking on the parts where they should go. We also played a game putting the names of the parts on our giant person.
This week we are looking at recycling, we learnt about all the bins and then we played a game looking for waste hidden around the room to put into the different bins. We also made a car with a box we had recycled, we made hats with left over paper and wool and a small village with wreaths and painting it. On the 26th we had puzzle day and did lots of puzzles. We also welcomed Alanna to our class!
We loved learning all about music, sounds of the musical instruments. We know that music is full of hope an joy. This is the reason why it is one of our childrens favourite thing about musical instruments. Our objectives were to follow the rhythms of each sound we made on the instrument, singing and dancing along with the music. We made our own drums, piano and guitar.
We learnt about the musical notes, and we played musical movement games. Their favourite game was ‘follow the rhythm’ in our room and in the garden too. This game was so much fun.
We started our Spring theme, so we made a big garden with flowers. We also made a hedgehog with some salt dough and let it dry overnight.
We made some butterflies and flowers with paper plates and decorated our wall with them.
Our ‘Around the World’ theme was lovely as we were learning about all the continents of the world, which we made with plates and green paper. We made the world with our hands and we did some fun games about the world.
The children were interested to know where we live in the world, so we talked to them about Ireland.
We did ‘Transport’ because they love to play cars and they were interested about how we can travel around the world and go on holidays.
We were making cars, trains, boats and aeroplanes. We made them with arts & crafts, paint, cutting and we also put those boats in to the microwave for them to be hard. Our Carnival party was lots of fun too.
Preschool 2
In January, we welcomed lots of new friends to preschool, Alaric, Darcy, Hazel, Isabella, Ivy, and Reina. For our first week back, we looked at our senses, exploring them and how we use them. We focused on one of our senses a day, doing different activities around that. We played games like cover our eyes and guess what’s in the box, we listened to different sounds and had to guess what they were. We used different materials to smell and touch and try to describe how they feel introducing new words we could use.
The children love reading books so this week we looked at books and the different characters in them. Everyone shared what their favourite book is and their favourite characters. We made some puppets and put on our own show creating our own stories. We also had lots of fun using our dress up box role playing different stories. We role played a lot of frozen and had lots of Elsa’s.
The children love doing art and we always have lots of left-over bits of paper/ cardboard so this week we looked at recycling and how we can use materials to create crafts. We also made three bins (Green, brown and black) we painted them together and talked about what things we can put in each one. We also read a book where “chip and Biff” learn how to recycle and another about our planet and the environment. The children really enjoyed bringing in recycle materials from home and with these they built different things like an aeroplane, a house, a bus… with cardboard, bottles, plastic.
This week we were looking at our bodies and our skeletons, learning the different parts and where our bones are. We made a big skeleton, with all its parts and coloured it together and hung it up. We also painted paper plates black and when they dried, we glued cotton ear buds on to make our skeletons. We also painted our hand black and pressed it on paper and added cotton ear buds, to make and x-ray of our hands. We learned a new song “dancing bones” which the children loved. On the 26th we had national puzzle day and we did lots of puzzles, helping each other out. We also welcomed Patrick to our class.
Our Pre-school children welcomed Spring and painted flowers and made our flowers using plates and leaves from the garden. We planted seeds in ours pots. We made the life cycle of the caterpillar to butterfly with paper plates. We made the eggs, caterpillar, cocoon, and butterfly. We made a house for our butterflies with leaves, sticks and soil.
For our Supermarket theme, we made a supermarket in class. We made lollipops and rainbow pasta to sell for the bargain price of $40! (its organic!) We also made our own sign and then started to sell different items throughout the week. We started with pasta and ended with books, clothes and even pet fish.
For our Dinosaurs theme, we created an archaeology dig in our sand box. We first made our own dinosaur bones using salt dough and letting it harden overnight. Our Educarers then hid the bones in our sand box and let us search for the bones using our equipment.
We made our own dinosaur (the preschool-asauros) for our class. We then went outside into the garden and collected leaves, sticks and soil for our dinosaur box.
