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.
Antoinette Hannigan – Crèche Manager
Activities from our Baby Room
Our babies could feel enjoy our environment inside the room. Our staff gave them the opportunity to touch, feel and discover the wonderful world of the trees and their leaves. Our babies enjoyed playing with leaves and singing autumn songs, their favourite was “leaves are falling down”.
This month hey had a special interest in the farm this month so our babies were very busy discovering all the animals that they can find at the farm and the noises that they make. All this was supported by songs “ Old Mc Donald”, books “explorer the farm” and pictures that the staff provided them to make it more visual for our delighted babies.
We also learned about transports how to take care of cars cleaning with sponges making tractors painting with cotton and playing with all our cars, planes, helicopters.
We like celebrating traditional festivals and this month we really enjoyed getting our room ready for Halloween. They made funny ghosts with their feet. Trick or treat, smell my feet!
At this stage babies really enjoy sensory games and this is why our teachers stimulate them providing them different materials such sand, aluminum foil, paint, rice, lentils.
This month our babies not only used their hands for painting. They used their feet, cars, sponge and different stuff to create very nice art. Also, we gave them the opportunity to develop their autonomy while they are doing the activities feeling free to create as far as their imagination can go.
Stories from our Wonderful Wobbler Room
Our wobbler room had a brilliant month learning all about their different senses, dinosaurs and the colours of the rainbow,
Our Educarers made a surprise touching box with rough, soft, bumpy, hard and smooth textures, the children really enjoyed to put their hands inside the box and feel the different textures.
The children and Educarers then made a sensory board and glued feathers, sponges, sticks and paper on to it to show the children how different they are from each other.
We explored our senses of smell sense and put coffee, mint, lemon essence, thyme, vanilla essence, and perfume into smelling bottles and gave them to the children to smell. They particularly enjoyed smelling the coffee one and after the activity was over the children were pointing to the coffee one to smell it again.
We added rice, sugar and different levels of water to make musical sounds, the children were so interested in hearing the noises that they made.
We played musical statues and made some moon sand using flour and vegetable oil with a pinch of salt, they really enjoyed making sandcastles.
Our children love new dinosaurs, so we added some into our animal box, and pretended to be dinosaurs and walked around the room making roar sounds. We used the new dinosaurs to paint dinosaur prints by dipping their feet into paint and printing it onto the paper.
We made playdough and used the dinosaurs to print their feet into the playdough. We coloured some baby dinosaurs and then coloured in dinosaur eggs to show the children that dinosaurs also lay eggs .
This month our wobblers are really interested in pouring out the toys, so we did lots of scooping and pouring using pasta, rice, ice, water and lentils to practise our skills.
Tales from our Toddler Room
Our toddler room had a fantastic month learning all about numbers and colours.
We made a huge tree and stuck leaves on it. the children used their hands and brushes to paint the leaves of the tree. We gave the children shape stencils and used the stencils to make playdough shapes.
We painted lollipop sticks and put coloured card onto boxes, the children had to sort the sticks into the correct colours. They were so intrigued and were sitting for a good while doing this activity.
We put salt into boxes and used our fingers to trace the numbers 1-5, the children were saying it felt funny on their fingers.
Our Educarers made some coloured tubes and got the matching pompoms and the children had to put the matching pompom down the coloured tube.
We made some fishing poles and some fish with matching numbers, the educarers said numbers and the children used their fishing poles to catch the fish. They thoroughly enjoyed this activity by their laughs.
National Road Safety week / Beep Beep Week was great and the children really enjoyed preparing arts and craft for this learning activity. The children enjoyed learning the colours of the traffic and lights and the significance of the colours and their meaning. We painted our own individual traffic lights and stop signs; we took this activity out play to the garden with the children taking turns wearing the high vis jacket and holding up the signs to stop and go the children
It was national food day this month and the children painted their favourite foods, they painted potatoes, chips, pasta, and bread!
Pre-School Room News
As the Autumn firmly takes hold and the sun hangs lower in the sky the children quickly noticed their shadows growing longer on the ground with great excitement, we decided to take this interest into our classroom and carried out some shadow experiments using both the natural sunlight and torches.
The children built structures with our rainbow acrylic blocks and traced the amazing shadows which the sun cast through them. We made a shadow theatre with Halloween themed silhouette puppets and told funny spooky stories about witches chasing cats, bats, and spiders. The children explored the light and dark with our huge torch casting giant shadows on the ceiling, floor, and walls. A group of children shone the torch into the garden and were heard saying ‘see can it touch the clouds.’
The children are always finding insect visitors in our garden and this week was no exception. Together we discovered how to identify an insect from other creatures such as spiders by identifying the number of body parts, legs, and wings. We made our own insects to add to our scrap book and gave them names too.
Halloween preparations have been ongoing throughout the month and the preschool classrooms looks terrific. The children have made large and small posters to decorate the doors and walls, to support our shadow exploration they stencilled bats with white paint onto black paper, we read ‘Room on the Broom’ by Julia Donaldson which inspired the children to make and decorate their own witches’ hats. We made spooky ghosts with streamers to eerily blow about the room. The children washed and polished the pumpkins which are on our nature table. In small groups the children excavated the pumpkins, for some of them this was perhaps their first time to see inside, and the children were eager to dive in and pull out all the slimy seeds. The Educarer carved a pumpkin face and as part of our Halloween party we carried out a pumpkin volcano experiment which never fails to impress.
As always living in Ireland there is always lots of talk about the everchanging weather and preschool is no exception. For this emerging interest the children were particularly interested in the rain cycle and cloud formation. We read some weather books and studied the pictures together and created our own weather charts and cloud diagrams to support our learning.
National Road Safety week or Beep Beep week got off to a great start. Together the children identified the colours of the traffic and pedestrian lights and the significance of the colours and their meaning. We painted our own individual traffic lights and added them to our scrap books, we created cardboard traffic lights for our role play centre. We took our role play out to the garden with the children taking turns wearing the high vis jacket to act as the lollipop person holding up the signs to stop the children on their bicycles and called the other children across when it was safe. The children really enjoyed this activity, and everyone took a turn if they wished. We also made a big bus with cardboard and paint on it to do a road safety role play in the garden. Each child given to hold a road sign and traffic lights to take part in the role play activity. Some children hold the bus with singing the wheel on the bus song to start the activity. The children are really showing interest and enjoy throughout the activity.
For pet day we identified which animals make the best pets. We identified what pets some of the children already had at home both really and imaginary. The Educarers shared some photos of their own pets and experiences of looking after a pet and their funny personalities. We created a bar chart to discover the most popular pet the children would like to look after one day. We played a mini pet quiz game and gave pet yoga a go in the garden. The educarers and children had a short sharing session about pets, we talked about the food they eat and where do pets stay with showing pictures. Then, the children created pets and pets house craft with paper plates, paper and paint also they give a name for their own pet.
For Food of the world day we chatted about our favourite food we have at home, the children were invited to draw their favourite meals, pizza of course being one of them and it country of origin. The children crafted their own pizza plates and added their favourite toppings. We also discussed Mexican food Taco, about the food ingredients and the facts of the food, and we introduced the name of the ingredients. Then, the children made taco with crepe paper and papers follow by their choice.
For profession, we learned about doctors. We made a medical aid box and an X-ray craft with cotton buds and handprint. We also learned about fireman, the children made a fire and fire prevention craft to get the concept of the fire colour and the fireman’s job.
To prepare for the Halloween celebration we created plenty of crafts to decorate the preschool room. The children have made pumpkin craft with paper plates and paint also monster craft with tissue roll, tissue, and googly eyes. The children also love sticking and gluing so we made puffy ghost craft with glue and cotton ball.
