As the Autumn season truly kicked in, we enjoyed lots of lovely fun learning. We loved learning about the Farm, Autumn colours and materials and
transport too. We celebrated Halloween towards the end of the month with lots of Halloween arts and crafts, games and Dress Up Days.
Our children also loved Pet Day and learning all about different world cuisines during World Food Day. During Beep Beep Day and Road Safety
Week, we did lots of games and activities to help us learn about the importance of road safety.
As always, 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 October. We
hope you enjoying browsing through them.
Sarah Bell – Crèche Manager
Activities from our Baby Room
Our babies love playing with the cars, so we decided to focus on transport. The first activity we did is painting with the wheels of our toy cars on paper. Our babies loved this activity, exploring the different shapes they made. We also made a train and a tractor. We used our hands and fingers to make the windows and decorate it.
Our babies loved spending time in the garden playing with the cars, bicycles, and the tractors. In the classroom we had lots of fun with our toys and having races.
For Pet Day, the babies loved playing with the animals and when we role play. First, we put some water in a box with the animals from the sea, and they explored playing with them in the water. The following day, we did some painting with our own body and made dogs and cats. They loved looking at photos of some of their pets. We also got a box and put some Rice Krispies and the farm animals in a box and had some fun with messy play.
With Halloween fast approaching, we decided to start decorating our classroom. The first activity we did was to make pumpkins with the paper roll which they enjoyed a lot. Then we did some painting using our hands and feet to make Frankenstein’s and witches. We used them to decorate the door. We saw the children loved this activity so much, that we decided to make ghosts too. We put them in the window, along with a big spider to scare everyone. We sang a lot of fun songs about Halloween and read stories about Halloween.
Most of our babies are starting to walk and crawl. As they our moving about more we decided to focus on our bodies this week. We sang lots of songs about the body, pointing at our different body parts so they can start to associate them. We made a body using paint and crayons. We also dressed up for Halloween which was lots of fun and made some flashcards with our different body parts and played games.
Stories from our Wonderful Wobbler Room
Our wobblers are fascinated by all the different birds we see when we are out in the garden. They get super excited when we see them flying over us outside, so we took this opportunity to introduce the topic of birds and to learn lots of new facts about our feathered friends. We talked about what features a bird has and how to identify the different parts of their bodies, wings, feet, beaks, tail and about all the different coloured species of birds on our plant. We created a beautiful peacock using paint, glue, and lots of colourful feathers and the children had fun making some pellets(food) for our pet peacock.
All our wobblers are always super excited when we hear the train pass here in Drumcondra, so we decided to create our own train using two boxes, which the wobblers painted and set to dry. We then joined the boxes together to create carriages. All the children were choo-chooing around the room. Our passengers set off from our wobbler station and we took turns being the conductor and bringing our friends all around Dublin. We also had lots of fun with our car and train sets within our classroom.
We have lots of super builder in our room. The children love to build towers and buildings out of our blocks in our construction area. We decided to use this opportunity to talk about some of the famous and popular buildings that we see in the Dublin. We all work together with paint and colours to design famous areas like Temple bar and famous monuments like The Spire. We continued to build super big towers and castles with all our friends using different material we could find.
The children have embraced the arrival of autumn and were very curious about all the leaves falling from the trees. We collected leaves that had fallen to the ground and examined all the different colours and shapes we could find. We all talked about what happens in autumn and what we need to do now that the weather is colder. We talked about suitable clothing, and everyone was super excited to bring in new hats, scarfs, and all kinds of autumn/ winter attire. We also created a colourful umbrella. We got super creative and made a tree using our handprints.
We used lots of different autumn colours like yellow, orange, green and brown. We also glued some leaves and different materials that we gathered from outside and added it to our autumn mural in our room.
Tales from our Toddler Room
Our toddlers were interested on why the leaves of the trees were changing their colours and falling off out in our garden. We decided to use this opportunity to introduce the seasonal transition of Spring to Autumn. We began by collecting leaves, seeds, and other natural materials from the garden. The toddlers worked together as a team to collect the different materials. We were learning about the shape of the plants, what kind of plants we have in our garden and the examined and compared all the different colours of the leaves. We had fun making some leave prints and we created some hedgehogs using the materials that we gathered outside. We also created our own nature box which we plan to regularly update with lots of seasonally materials.
Another week arrived and our kids were talking about their pets at home. Pet day was one of our October events so this fitted perfectly for this week’s activities. Some of the children and Educarers brought in pictures of their pets for all our friends to see. We talked about the care of our pets and what we love about them. We got our creative skills working and designed some wonderful art for our room. We designed our very own dog and cat using paint and crepe paper for our room.
As the weather is changing and the mornings were getting colder, some of the toddlers were wearing hats, scarfs, and boots to school and when we went out for our garden times. The children were all examining their friends’ new puffy coats, warm hats, and wellies so we took this opportunity to learn all about suitable clothing for different weather conditions. We created some attachable clothes for our boy and girl templates and used Velcro to stick what clothing was deemed suitable for the weather each day.
We decorated our classroom with Halloween decorations. The children were so excited to talk about scary things and dressing up for Halloween. We did lots of arts and crafts, we made ghosts, pumpkins, and a vampire. The children noticed that the leaves had changed colours in the garden. So, we had lots of fun exploring and gathering different leaves. We sang lots of Halloween songs and read some Halloween stories.
Pre-School Room News
Preschool 1
At the start of the month, we looked at shapes. We were shape detectives and tried to find all the shapes around our classroom. We used our shapes to make different pictures using our imagination. We learned a song about shapes too. We welcomed Doireann and Daire to our classroom and loved playing with our new friends. We played listening games where we had to guess the sounds. We did lots of sand and playdough play.
Next, we looked at transport and road safety. We made traffic lights with glue and crepe paper and learned some new songs about crossing the road. We also played traffic light games in the garden. We made a car and took turns roleplaying being a lollipop lady, helping each other to cross the road.
The children started to notice the change in the weather. So, we made Autumn trees using all the different colours of the changing leaves. We sang some cool songs about autumn leaves falling. We chatted about wearing warmer clothing for the colder weather. All our friends helped Matthew celebrate his 3rd birthday with lots of fun and games for all.
We were all super excited for Halloween in preschool, so we decided to make some spooky decorations for our room. They are terrifically terrifying, and we cannot wait for our dress up party. We also talked about the farm and what animals we might see there. We got super creative and made some chickens using our fingers and hands to design it. We also made some sheep in afield, painting and gluing with cotton wool. We had lots of fun doing some role play using our farm story and talked about the different roles on the farm. We also made some pretend udders for our cow and took turns milking it. Preschool enjoyed celebrating World Food Day on the 20th, where we tried some new fruits, they were delicious, and some were really sour!
For Halloween, we enjoyed playing lots of Halloween games like Dress the Mummy and Pin the Hat on the Witch. We were so excited about our dress up day and couldn’t wait to see all the different costumes and outfits that our friends and teachers wore.
Preschool 2
Preschool 2 really enjoyed October! We loved wearing our arm bands for Beep Beep Day while we went on our bikes in the garden!
We loved learning all about the farm, like painted animals and using lentils to glue animal shapes. We also learnt how to milk a cow as our Educarers Soraya and Andrea helped us to make a big cow and a rubber glove with water as the udders.
Then we were super interested in Princesses and Dragons so we started to learn all about those. We made castles together, and a big fire breathing dragon with dragon eggs. We also painted prince and princess crowns and used glitter to make them sparkly.
We were loving our transport so we were learning all about cars on earth, boats on water and airplanes in the sky. We made these out of pieces of apples.
The children noticed the leaves falling from the trees and that the weather is getting colder, so we decided to focus on autumn and the changing seasons. We made autumn crafts, we picked leaves and sticks in the garden, and we made trees and our own gardens, gluing and painting. It was also national beep beep day, so we made traffic lights which we played with in the garden. We made a car and role-played driving and crossing the road.
This week we were talking about pets they like, most of the children have dogs or would love one! We made cat and dog paintings and made a fish in a fishbowl. We thought of all the cool names we would call them. The children love doing the paw patrol puzzles. We were reading books like “The wish cat” and singing songs like “monkeys in the bed”
The children really love dinosaurs, so we decided to focus on it this week. The children love to read “Harry and the bucketful of dinosaurs”. We made big dinosaurs using crepe paper, making small balls to cover all our dinosaurs. We made two other dinosaurs the children loved teaching each other and us all the different ones. At the end of the week, we had a Halloween party and we all dressed up we had great fun and made lots of decorations for our classroom.
Halloween was such fun – we made lots of arts and crafts like ghosts, bats and spiders and listened to spooky songs and enjoyed a super fun Dress Up Day.
