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
For our Fingers and Toes learning, our Educarers were labelling and naming the babies body parts through a variety of songs and movement.
We love Teddy Bears, and our babies painted their own Teddy Bears using different items to spread the paint around the paper. The babies really enjoyed mark making
on the paper with the paint. We introduced the famous children’s story ‘We’re going on a bear hunt’ and they loved it.
To show our babies different soft textures, we offered them lots of different textured items to explore. From cotton wool, feathers, and other soft materials like felt, to sponges
and cloths. Our Educarers also created their own milk the cow activity for the children to explore different sensorial textures.
All our babies are starting to take to their feet now and getting huge enjoyment from the ‘walking, walking’ song.
Our Educarers are providing the babies with lots of walking opportunities during all the daily transitions.
Our babies are starting to communicate more through verbal sounds to each other and their Educarers now too. A favourite game is ‘peek a boo’ which always gets lots of
squeals of delight from our babies.
The Baby Room warmly welcomed baby Casey, Aoife and Hayley and Darragh this month. All our Educarers are excited to get to know the new children and help them
settle in and explore their new environment.
News from our Wobbler Room
Our wobblers loved activities all about discovering their Fingers and toes: They explored painting using their fingers and toes and created a huge farewell poster for one of their
Educators using their feet and paint. The children learned the song ‘One little finger’ and loved doing the actions too.
They also experienced ‘Old McDonald had a farm’ through the use of finger puppets.
For our Circus theme, the highlight was when our Educarers made a ‘coconut board’ using various toys in the garden and the children took turns throwing balls to knock
everything down.
Our children learned about the different colours of the traffic lights and through playing the traffic light game in the garden the children experienced moving fast. When our
Educarer called green, we walked fast, slow when the colour orange was called and froze on the spot for colour red.
Some of the emerging interests explored throughout the month included looking after our baby dolls. The children helped to feed, wash and dress the dolls and cared for
them with such love.
Our children made colour monsters and introduced the different emotions associated with colour. Through a science experiment using baking soda and vinegar the
children experienced a fun and safe explosion of colours.
Our wobblers were delighted and excited to welcome Sam to their room as he quickly makes friends and explores his new environment.
What Have Our Toddlers Been Up To?
Our toddler children explored the medium of paint through finger painting coloured fruit and insects. They enjoyed learning the actions to the little song ‘ Daddy finger’ and
used their toes to paint too.
For our Circus theme, we explored the idea of the circus and seeing a show with acrobats and animals. The children learned animals sounds and acrobat style shapes and
dancing to music.
Traffic lights and cars was a nice topic for our children to learn about traffic safety. They coloured in different colours of the traffic lights and crafted their own traffic light box for
the classroom. In the garden the children experience gaining more control of the gross motor skills through moving fast, slow and stopping still.
For our New Year’s resolutions, the children talked about being good friends, sharing, caring for each other and to try their best. They made stars with their aspirations for the
coming year.
Some other emerging interest included:
Routine:
As the children were settling back, they have become very
aware of the daily routine and know when transitions are
going to occur. The Educarers acknowledged this by
exploring with the children why we have routine and the
importance of the different aspects of our routine, such as
handwashing. We sang our handwashing song at lot when
talking about this topic too.
Nature:
The children explored nature using different materials to
paint, such as stamping with flowers, painting with sticks
and feathers. They finger painted fabulous flowers and
made fluffy white clouds to stick on their notice board.
Everyday, our Educarers are sharing stories with the
children as the children are showing a great interest and
love of books by introducing new concepts such as natural
science, the planet earth and insects.
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:
Educarers provided the children with a broad range of
materials to paint with, including items like hard corks, spikey
dish brushes and fluffy cotton buds. The children made
lemon flavoured biscuits sprinkled with lemon zest with their
Educarers to experience their senses of taste.
‘Sweet and spicy’, one child announced when sucking a juice
piece of orange in our tasting challenge.
Other flavours their explored included lemon, vinegar and
sugar. While blindfolded the children guessed what textures
they were feeling including hard pasta and ice cubes.
The children also engaged in sensorial water play. It snowed
just in time to get first-hand experience of freezing cold and
the wonders of melting in the heat of our hands.
Human Body:
Our children love reading and we read lots of new books about the human body, our body parts, and our bones. “Ms. Tongue is at home” is a lovely interactive story that
Our children identified the parts of the body, we looked at
x-rays and talked about what is under our skin. The children
created their own bony skeleton using cotton buds to
represent our bones, and did hand and foot prints to look
like X-rays. Then the children assembled their own skeleton
in a small group activity.
Recycling:
We talk about recycling a lot in our classroom, and we
added a black, green and compost bin to our recycling
station. We talked about looking after our plant and
reducing the amount of tissue we use to clean up and when
drying our hands in order to save our planets trees.
Other Activities:
The children have a number of songs they look forward to
everyday. One huge favourite is ‘Five little snowmen
standing in a row’. The children love the actions and singing
their heart out for this one. Another popular one in both
preschool rooms is the dance game ‘The floor is lava’. This
activity is one of our favourite parts of the day.
Emerging interest this month included the wonder of magic
and magic show illusion, looking after our pets and the
difference between pets and wild animals.
For New Year’s resolutions all our children shared their
hopes and aspirations for the new year, decorated their
little notes and agreed to be their best selves in all they do.
