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 bi-monthly newsletter, we have shared some insight into the activities from each of our rooms, that all took place over the
first two weeks in February.
Our next newsletter for you will be in four weeks time, in the middle of March, where we will share more news with you on what our
children have been doing. Stay Safe.
P R E E T A T E P O O – C R È C H E M A N A G E R
Activities from our Baby Room
What a lovely two weeks our babies have had so far.
We learnt all about the colours of the seasons and now that it is Spring, we explored with cool and light colours, such as pastels, yellows, and light orange colours and red to
represent the Spring season in all its glory.
Adding paint to the floor mats and allowing our babies to explore the slippery paint, while practicing their walking skills was lots of fun. They are trying really hard to master
the art of walking, and they are doing so well.
Our experiment with coloured paper and water left our babies fascinated with how the water coloured changed when they ripped pieces of the paper off and say the water
transform into different shades. We displayed our art in our wall dedicated to cold colours. We hope that someday
soon, our parents can come inside our rooms and see it.
To celebrate St Valentines Day, we did some abstract art with little pieces of paper.
Each Wednesday is dedicated to improving our motor skills so we made a circuit made from different blocks so our babies could improve and strengthen their bodies. Our Educarers made a shadow Puppet Show for our babies, using homemade characters from our babies favourite book called, “Daddy Pig Gets Fit”. They were amazed during the play and tried to discover what was going on behind the curtain!
News from our Wobbler Room
Our wobblers enjoyed some wonderful arts and crafts for our Circus theme, making lions and elephants out of paper plates.
For Balance Day, we spent lots of time playing with our obstacle mats and climbing on the ramps and strengthening our legs too at the same time.
We love water play, and we gave our dolls a bath with lots of soapy bubbles. Our farm animals were next to have a bath after that.
We have been enjoying exploring our colours, and our sensorial bags were a great way for us to learn the words of the colours too. Our Educarers added different colours into
the bags and then taught our children the words for the colours. Sticking the bags to the windows gave them a different glow in the light, showing the children that when
we put things against light, they change shades.
Exploring with other items for arts and crafts was fun too. Our children used cottonwool and clothes pegs as their brushes and dipped them in paint to created different textured art. We also mixed the colours to create different shades of paint. Our children loved seeing that white and red paint mixed together makes pink paint.
The floor of our room was decorated with lots of different coloured round shapes and we use our construction blocks to sort them into the size colour groups.
To celebrate St Valentines Day, we made a lovely card with our little footprints in them so our parents can treasure as a keepsake.
What Have Our Toddlers Been Up To?
For our Colours theme, our toddlers enjoyed lots of fun outdoor games and arts to expand on their learning. Cristina & Andrea played Simon Says in the garden with them , adding different colours and shapes to encourage our children to learn about the colour words.
We also did lots of colour mixing, rainbow art and used our favourite book, The Colour Monster to talk about our emotions.
For our sensory play, we played with red and blue pasta shapes.
One of the days, we did a Sink and Float Water Experiment with our children, showing them that some items sink and some will float. We made our own paper boats and decorated them and added them to the water to see if they sank or floated. We tried to blow them out to sea.
Our children also learned about how water is formed and the life cycle of water and rain, how drops of water is created and what makes the clouds in the sky.
Playing with ice allowed us to explore the differences between solid and liquid water.
For St Valentines Day, we decorated a big heart that we put on the wall, and decorated Valentine’s lollypops to bring home. In the afternoon, we shared stories about love and friendship.
Preschool Room Adventures
Our preschool children had a full two weeks of activities, which included them learning about dragons, dinosaurs, insects and bugs and St Valentines Day.
Preschool 1
For our Dinosaurs theme we made messy dino prints with paint and our handprints. We made a micro system with different coloured textured paper. During PE time, we
pretended we were dinosaurs, stomping around the room.
We also learned some Spanish words about dinosaurs too, and had a Puppet Show at story time, using the characters from our story book, and our imaginations.
Dragons and castles and forts were all very popular themes with our children. We created our own castle and made crowns, shields and bridges to protect it from the dragon.
This was a great role play for our children. They took turns being different characters. They also enjoyed lots of books about castle, kings and queens, knights, witches, princes and princesses, and learned about the history of them. Using these characters, we added them to our sensory box and water games. We created Rapunzel’s tower by painting the towers on each of our fingers.
For Valentines Day, we did lots of love heart art work and painted with different textures. Welcome back Anna, who returned to class. We are delighted to have her back with us.
Preschool 2
Fairy tales of medieval times, folklore, dragons, castles and knights was talked about a lot over the past two weeks in Preschool 2.
” Once upon a time, dragons lived on the top of mountains scaring everyone around. But there was a princess, the bravest in the whole kingdom of Portmarnock. She talked with one of the dragons and discovered that the dragon was sad because nobody wanted to play with him…..” This was the story that our children started the month off with, and they loved it. They discovered that the dragon wasn’t as scary after all, and he just wanted someone toplay with.
We role played our characters and made arts and crafts out of the same theme. We became overnight Wizards and made magic potions and spells during our science experiments to turn our Educarers into animals. Our children had a huge interest in learning about the life cycle of butterflies and bugs. We made our own insects out of cardboard and paper. With our magnifying glass in tow, we set off out to the garden to find bugs and insects with our Bug Viewer.
And to top off this subject, we read all about The Very Hungry Caterpillar and how he transformed into the most beautiful butterfly.
After-school Adventures
During the first week of February the Afterschoolers talked about the lifecycle of butterflies. We made colourful butterflies
using materials with different textures.
Out of a carboard box that we painted, we made a new mini-basketball game and we really enjoyed playing with it.
We used our new gems and we made beautiful bracelets and necklaces to work on our fine motor-skills.
We also celebrated Balance Day, and we pretended to be butterflies flying all over the room. We enjoyed lots f time in the
garden too, trying to spot butterflies and flying insects and birds.
For our Dance & Drama activities, we created a Dinosaur theatre and made our own puppets for our show. We created
backdrops for the different scenes and made-up different stories for our show too.
Arts and crafts also involved dinosaur themed characters and we added these to our St Valentines Day artwork and cards. We
even learned Spanish words about dinosaurs!
For PE, we played a game to try and find the dinosaur in the garden and made map to go on our hunt.
