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 monthly newsletter, we have shared some insight into the activities from each of our rooms.
Just a additional note to say that our Baby Rooms are nearing capacity in all of our crèches for 2021 so we would like to advise any parents that might be expecting and if you require
any sibling places, please enroll as soon as possible. Application forms are available from us or you can also contact Kim from our Admissions Team on kim.jones@linkschildcare.ie.
Stay Safe.
ELIANE MCMAHON – C R È C H E M A N A G E R
Activities from our Baby Room
To celebrate spring this month, our babies created painted flowers with their hands, feet, and finger printing. Our Educarers named the different colours and body parts
throughout the activity.
Many of the textures the children experienced this month included wool, ice, paint, leaves, and pasta.
We introduced some new weather songs and talked to the children all about the different weather we can see outside our window this month. When it snowed, we collected snow
and ice to bring inside to our room for the children to explore and feel.
We made the different sounds that animals make and asked the children, ‘what sound does the sheep make` and their favourite song of the month was Old Macdonald Had a
Farm.
We enjoyed lots of sensory play, such as muddy puddles (made with corn flour and water) water play, experimented with milk and food colouring, paint with ice cubes, bubble
wrap paint, textures with berries, and glop, rice play and feather play.
Our Spring wall is really coming to life, with a tree in the centre, clouds, raindrops, snow, and rainbows.
We also had a nature play with real flower and herbs. Our babies loved the textures.
We made different kinds of bugs and flower for arts and craft.
Stories from our Wonderful Wobbler Room
We started the month welcoming Spring in our Wobbler Room.
We planted some lentils with cotton and water to learn how they grow. We are watching the growing process all month.
The children are starting to explore their practical life skills such as opening and closing the door and switching on and off the lights! Together we made a little house out of a cardboard box to play with the animals, the children painted and decorated it.
We welcome some new children to our room this month and we introduced our routine to them to welcome them to our room. We sang new songs, made balance courses with our mats to support their newly acquired walking skills and incorporated yoga moves into our routine.
The children are exploring and developing their building skills using different materials. We shared a story called ‘the taste of the moon’ where the animals must make a tower to taste the moon! The children built different towers with the wood bricks, mats, animals, fishes, Lego bricks, and the books.
We also printed with paint a tower with the Lego bricks and wood bricks. We celebrated St Valentine’s Day by making cards with hearts to bring home to our families.
During the month we experienced lots of rain, sleet, and snow. The children were fascinated looking out the window.
We introduced songs about the weather to the children including ‘how is the weather’ and ‘Mr Sun’ and created a weather wall with sun and clouds to reflect the weather
outside.
We created a windsock to see the strength of the wind. We did an experiment about rain with foam, water, and food colouring.
On Pancake Tuesday we designed a smiley face pancake with fruit.
We had loads of sensory play. We even explored with eggs shells, enjoyed feather play. We planted seeds and we love watching them growing, sand play, water play, gloop, spaghetti play, nature leaves and flowers, grass and snow play.
Tails From Our Toddler Room
Our children made flowers using crepe paper, butterflies and made birds using feathers to welcome the season of Spring.
We made a mural for our wall with foam flowers. We printed flowers using cotton balls dipped in paint for printing.
We explored different colours through mixing paint colours to create new colours. We experienced coloured ice as a sensory activity and planted seeds to watch them grow on
our nature table.
We loved to explore spring textures, flavours of berries and colours, and made a nature collage.
Together with our Educarers, we shared a story called ‘On the moon’. The children were very curious, so we created our own moon using foil and black paint.
We talked about having good manners and being considerate of each other, and we role played and played games to practice our manners.
With all the wintery weather the children were experiencing this month we decided to look at different temperatures hot and cold.
The children experience the icy coldness of ice and the temperatures of different food with their mouth.
Preschool Room News
Spring has sprung at last and the preschool nature table has come alive with sprouting daffodil bulbs, growing from vegetable scraps watching for roots and leaves from our sweet potato and celery.
The children created various types of flowers using different papers and sprouted lentils in eggshells. They loved the story of the very hungry caterpillar.
Our Dinosaur theme never fails to impress. The children went on a dinosaur hunt following the giant dinosaur footprints, listened to dinosaurs roaring, made their own dinosaur fossils and bones and then the children imagined they were archaeologist and palaeontologist and excavated for fossils and bones in our sandpit. Some of the children even made dinosaur puppets. We had a volcano too
We looked at the life cycle of the butterfly, created our own colourful butterflies by folding and mixing colours. They made their own caterpillar using cotton wool and painted it.
Some of our emerging interests include discovering the hard work of our community firemen – the children painted their own red fire engine complete with ladder.
Another emerging interest was countries of the world. The children made a paper Mache earth, painted some flags of the world, explored music and dance of the world even gave it a go themselves. As a small group the children assembled puzzle of the world.
Carnival Day is very popular. We talked about costume parties, carnival party and decorated our own masks with glitter and a variety of different materials.
Our St Valentine’s Day preparations were a great success – we talked about the people we love and who loves us and through different art processes we decorated our cards
with hearts by rolling marbles through paint and rolling it across our heart cut-out’s we finished it off with a special poem for the children’s loved ones.
After reading the story about ‘the boy who switched of the sun’ we chatted about whether this would be possible one child pointed out that it would be too hot. We also talked about earth and other planets in our solar system, we created our own solar system for the classroom by splashing and made a paper Mache moon too.
For some of our eager to read we made a mini book on the solar system to complement our theme.
