A Brand New Year Awaits

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

It was lovely to see all our babies back after their Christmas break. And what a change a two week break brings. They have grown so big, so quickly.
During the month, we continued with all the activities that our babies adore doing, such as finger painting, singing and reading books.
We also created some special activities around our Curriculum based themes, which were the Senses, Fingers & Toes and Teddy Bears.

Our Educarers made some obstacle paths for our babies to explore textures. Adding elements onto the path, such as foil, bubble wrap, and blankets and toys, heightened our
babies senses of curiosity, as they stopped to touch the foil, or pick up a toy and examine it. Julia, our Educarer made a Textures Mat for our babies and they loved touching all the items on the mat.

Song of the Month:
‘Tom Thumb’ – they love to shake their bodies and clap their
hands when they sing it!

To further explore our babies senses, our Educarers created a play corner for them, which was filled with different soft materials so our babies could experience with textures of softness. They loved the taste experiment with whipped cream. The look of amazement when they discovered how yummy it tasted. It was lovely to see.
Our Winter Mystery Box was filled with different textured items and our babies put their little hands into the holes of the boxes to reach in to find an object to play with.
Sensory trays are a lovely way for our babies to discover different sensory items that will open their senses. We created these in crèche with a tray of flour, oats and flour, and water. We added some attractive and colourful toys into the trays and that really got them interested in trying to get the toys from the trays.
To improve their gross motor skills, we created a circuit with soft place mats, and called it ‘Rescue the teddy’. Babies mission was to rescue the bear by going up hills (mats), sliding through tunnels and climbing steps.
Why not make your own sensory clouds at home? We made these in crèche by painting some clouds onto cardboard and cutting them out. We hung short laces and texture figures on the clouds, and the babies loved pulling at the laces.

News from our Wobbler Room

Welcome back to all our Wobblers. We also gave a warm welcome to Emerie, who joined our Wobbler Room.
We said goodbye to Aoibhinn, who has moved into our Toddler Room. She is such a big girl now.
Our Winter theme was all about Polar Bears, ice and snow. There was such excitement as we woke to a small flicker of snow at the start of the month. Although not enough to make a Snowman, but still enough to make a Snow Angel or two.

We made bear paw prints for our Polar Bear themed art and Laura made some sensory boxes for our Wobblers to explore. She added some items with different textures
related with the winter, such as snow, snowflakes and white paint, and we had fun playing with these.
We love Farm Animals! We dipped our farm animals’ feet into paint and they made messy foot prints all over the farm. They are such messy little animals! We also fed them Rice Krispies too and they liked them very much.

What Have Our Toddlers Been Up To?

Lots of things, as our Educarers Cristina, Cristina E, Andrea and Carmen prepared a lot of lovely activities for us to explore and enjoy.
We learned about the Circus, painted clowns, and we made a Circus tent by cutting and gluing red paper together to make a tent shape.
Our children took a huge interested in learning all about Polar Bears too, as we loved reading the book ‘Penguins Can’t Fly’. In this book they also discovered other Artic
animals and mammals, such as seals and whales.

We painted an Igloo with pieces of sponges, and we made polar bears with little white papers. The best of all was when our Educarers hid animals in ice and we were able to
touch and melt the ice until we found the animals. Our Toddlers are such curious children, and they loved exploring their toes and finger. We did lots of painting with
our fingers tips and made fingers puppets and put on a Puppet Show for our friends.

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:
What better way to explore our senses of taste, than by tasting different types of foods ad smelling them and guessing what they are. We spoke about the different types of tastes; sweet, sour, bitter and sharp. And we had a great time baking too and tasting our homemade creations. Our children did a blind folding test, where they blind folded
their eyes and picked up various items and tried to guess what they were.

For our sense of hearing, we made different animal sounds to guess which animals we were trying to represent. We also painted with porridge and vanilla essence on bubble
wrap.

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
helps us explore and learn about our bones and our body, and the children loved this. Exercise is a great way to explain to our children how our joints and bones work, so we had fun doing Yoga and balancing games to keep us fit. For our role play, we played doctors and nurses and the importance of looking after our bodies through exercise
and healthy eating.

Recycling:
Teaching our children about the fundamental importance of recycling for our environment allows our children to be aware of the small steps they need to take to help our
environment grow and sustain.

We all gathered together to make recycling bins and learned about the different items that get disposed in them They took turns being bin collectors too, which they enjoyed.

For Inventors Day, we had great fun using our imagination to invent games and robots out of recycled materials. Our new Robot friend is called Robbie, (left) and we love him! We combined our recycling learning here to invent a new friend out of recycled materials.

And for Puzzle Day, we worked together to make some challenging puzzles. We learned that, through working together, you really can achieve anything.

Afterschool Room News

Nobody develops their senses better than Ninjas. That is why some of our after-school children love being Ninjas.
We played with the lights off and completed special missions to find treasures, using our senses.

For our recycling theme, our children reused bin sacks to create scary ghosts and reused a TV box to create and customized our own electric guitar. We are hoping to create a music group out of it.

Our afterschool children talked about pollution and the effects it has on the environment too. We painted a green and blue earth planet and drew some of the things that cause pollution and had discussions around this topic.

And for our human body learning, we drew bones in our hands to identify different bones in our bodies.

Aitor, our Afterschool Educarer is an amazing guitar player and singer, and we have really enjoyed singing with him.
We missed some friends from our Afterschool and Preschool Rooms this month, but we hope to see them all again very soon and play together.