What a fun month we have had.
In this newsletter, we have shared some insight into the activities from each of our rooms thathas taken place during the month of February. We hope you enjoy browsing through them.
We are also delighted to launch our complimentary hot meals for our staff too, which they arealso enjoying a lot.
Jennifer Murphy – Crèche Manager
Activities from our Baby Room
This month we were learning about food, the animals of the farm, the feelings with the Colour Monster and the Three Little pigs.
We were doing messy play playing with spaghetti. Babies enjoyed touching them and feeling between their fingers. We also stamped lemons and we paint to do a completed plate of good food!
Our babies are doing a lot of new things, we learned about the Colour Monster to show them our faces when we are sad or happy. We did an activity each day with a different colour for a different feeling: green was for calm, so we coloured the monster with green crayons; red is for anger, we broke red paper and we played putting them in and out of bottles and jars. They really like storytelling time with the book full of colours!
As they love the animals of the farm, we were discovering the sounds of the animals with our book of the farm with plenty of animals, we did a sheep with wool, and we painted with sponges a big pig full of mud. It was so funny getting dirty!
We used sensory bags and sensory bottles according to the topic of the week, so this week we play with bottles full of food for our animals of the farm!
Finally, we learned about the Three Little pigs, doing houses for the pigs with different materials as sticks. A nice pig mask and a puppet of a wolf sticking papers.
Stories from our Wonderful Wobbler Room
Our wobblers started the month getting to know the different means of transport. For this they have played with trucks in the sand, with boats in the water in the garden and they have painted with the cars, they listened to songs about transport and listened story times about it. They made an art and craft of a train using their hands. Looks great! We have also enjoyed the “fashion week”. Our little designers make a personal t-shirt using different colours to paint and stick the clothes in a body. Besides, they learned to washing and handing clothes. For the third week, they enjoyed with hide and seek.
The children played hide and seek in the garden, appearing and disappearing in front of the mirror in class, they were surprised by the magic box when they put their hand through the hole and took out an unknown toy.
Finally, we have worked the movement. To do this we did physical education touring a small circuit in the garden, we created a pinwheel, they played with different toys with different shapes and thus see their difference when moving and finally, we danced songs with steps, given that, they love to dance to the muscles song.
Tales from our Toddler Room
Although the month of February is always shorter, it hasn’t stopped us from doing a lot of activities!
We started the month discovering some gardeners in the garden, we became interested in the nature around us, we painted with the leaves that had fallen from the trees, we made Playdough figures with the elements of nature, and we explored in the Messy Play to find different types of leaves, sticks and stones!
Next, we wanted to work on shapes and forms, as they are everywhere! We made a tree with triangle leaves, played in the garden to find the shapes that our educarers told us, and we made a kite to fly away!!!
We spent so much time outside, that we became very interested in the sky, the planes, the moon that we see appear many evenings, and many things that made us think that it would be interesting to work on Space! So, we started making astronaut helmets so we could imagine going to the moon! We also painted a sky full of stars and as if that wasn’t enough…we made our own little rocket to go to the Moon!!!!
The rhythm doesn’t stop, and for this last week of February… we are going to learn about letters! Since many of us have started to identify them!!! We are growing by leaps and bounds!!!! We will see what the week has in store for us, but seeing how the month has been, we have a week full of new learning to come!
Pre-School Room News
During this month, we have been singing different songs from “The Lion King” movie while learning a bit more about how animals live in the desert and savannah.
Every time we go to the garden, we really enjoy playing with the balls and our amazing physical education sessions. We decided to learn about different sports such as tennis, basketball, rhythmic gymnastics… always accompanied by music, movement, and different motor circuits.
Stories are one our best friends. We are always willing to hear a new story. Our friend “buck” the dinosaur appeared to explain us a bit more about his life and we liked it so much that we wanted to investigate a little bit more. We learned that there are different types of dinosaurs that we didn´t know before thanks you our “dinosaur book”… We also discovered that many years ago there were fossils, and we could find ourselves in the sand like authentic palaeontologists.
One of their favourite questions was whether dinosaurs and people had ever seen each other but they had to know that dinosaurs became extinct many years ago, so they haven’t met humans. That’s why we decided to continue researching a little more to get to know the prehistory and the stone age.
We started the month of February working on shapes and we made lovely arts and crafts using them. A train with circles and trapezoids, a farm with rectangles and triangles… Then we worked on dinosaurs, a topic that all children love, and we stamped the figure of a dinosaur with sponges, we made cookies and dinosaur masks and to finish we matched our nature box with the topic and now it is the house of the dinosaurs.
Later, we were focused on the lifecycle of the butterfly and the frog, where we were explaining it and doing crafts and we also related them to food chains. Finally, the children were interested in the insects as they were looking for them in the garden.
With all this, we celebrated balance day by doing exercises in the garden, Mini Beast Day where we told stories and did a role-play in the garden, Valentine’s Day with cards full of love and Carnival day with lots of humour and full of costumes.
After-School Room News
February has been a month full of great experiences in our after-school class.
We have celebrated some special dates, like the Chinese New Year, making our own Chinese lantern! We have been talking about different cultures and learning of them, like in our Spanish lessons where we are learning to count in Spanish and learning about their culture. Of course, we had some time for our baking days, making our well-known cookies.
And we can’t forget the most beautiful day of the month: St Valentines! We spent this day making our very best cards for the people that we love, love was in the air! We can’t wait for the next month.
