Celebrations of Culture & Kindness
What a busy four weeks we have had in crèche – and what fun too.
Celebrations included St Patrick’s Day, Easter, and we enjoyed themed events such as National Pet Day, caring for our pets and Gardening Day.
We are delighted to welcome back all of our children and we are having such fun together. 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 over the last four weeks . Susan, our Chef, based in Links Clontarf has also shared a recipe for one of our children’s all time favourite dinners, Beef Stroganoff!
Just a note to say that our Baby Rooms are very close to capacity in all of our crèches for 2021 and into 2022 so we would like to advise any parents that might be expecting and if you require any sibling places, please enrol as soon as possible. Application forms are available from us or you can also contact Kim from our Admissions Team on kim.jones@linkschildcare.ie.
Our next newsletter for you will be in four weeks time, in the middle of May, where we will share more news with you on what our children have been doing.
Take Care.
Preeta Tepoo – Crèche Manager
Activities from our Baby Room
Our babies were very busy becoming explorers! We kept learning more and more about the jungle, finally getting fully ready to dive into the jungle. We made paper hats for protecting ourselves against the sun and binoculars in order to go birdwatching on the garden.
In March, we celebrated Saint Patrick’s Day altogether by painting shamrocks with bell peppers. We all ended up green as it’s really hard to grab the peppers. We’ll have to practice getting better at it.
We also worked our motor skills, and we had so much fun as we love climbing and creeping.
Finally, we made our very own bread! We mixed the ingredients, kneaded the dough, and asked Connor, our great chef, to bake it for us. It tasted delicious! We brought some of it home, to give our families a taste of how much fun we always have in our Baby Room.
We loved learning all about the jungle in previous weeks, so we wanted to get a final grip of this amazing environment by learning about the animals that inhabit it.
We created our very own tiger through messy orange painting. It looked so well in our jungle’s board, now nearly finished.
We also learned all their names and the noises they make through interesting flashcards.
Our babies enjoyed a motor circuit filled with slopes to slide on and blocks to jump from, it looked like a real jungle!
We also learned about jungle’s colours by engaging in some messy painting with a new twist, instead of paint we used coloured yogurt! The smell, colour and taste of it got all of us amazed, we ended up all gooey and sticky!
Our babies were very busy becoming explorers! We kept learning more and more about the jungle, finally getting fully ready to dive into the jungle. We made paper hats for protecting ourselves against the sun and binoculars in order to go birdwatching on the garden.
In March, we celebrated Saint Patrick’s Day altogether by painting shamrocks with bell peppers. We all ended up green as it’s really hard to grab the peppers. We’ll have to practice getting better at it.
We also worked our motor skills, and we had so much fun as we love climbing and creeping.
Finally, we made our very own bread! We mixed the ingredients, kneaded the dough, and asked Connor, our great chef, to bake it for us. It tasted delicious! We brought some of it home, to give our families a taste of how much fun we always have in our Baby Room.
We loved learning all about the jungle in previous weeks, so we wanted to get a final grip of this amazing environment by learning about the animals that inhabit it.
We created our very own tiger through messy orange painting. It looked so well in our jungle’s board, now nearly finished.
We also learned all their names and the noises they make through interesting flashcards.
Our babies enjoyed a motor circuit filled with slopes to slide on and blocks to jump from, it looked like a real jungle!
We also learned about jungle’s colours by engaging in some messy painting with a new twist, instead of paint we used coloured yogurt! The smell, colour and taste of it got all of us amazed, we ended up all gooey and sticky!
For our Easter theme, we started by making a beautiful bunny poster and added marvellous eggs with a mixture of tissue, water and glue. It was so much fun! Well, Marta, our Educarer, had to help us a little bit though.
The next step was to paint some decorations for the whiteboards, which we did using some potatoes! Marta shaped them into the shape of eggs shaped and we used then as stamps and they really did the trick!
Once the decoration was ready, it was our turn for stamping the eggs. They needed to be decorated as well, which we did through messy painting.
Now, everything was ready for our incredible Easter hunt! We went to the garden and looked all over for the eggs in order to get them into our basket. This was such a fun activity!
Our story of the month was “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”. Our Educarers read the story and we used flashcards they made for us with our story boards.
We also learned about different sizes, volumes and how to use different tools through messy play with flour and different buckets that our great Chef Connor provided. We ended up getting the whole crèche full of white flour!
We also made our own little bears and goldilocks to decorate our board, they looked fantastic.
To help develop our gross motor skills, we were pretending we were Goldilocks, trying to reach Daddy bears huge bed, and folding ourselves into Baby Bear’s tiny bed. We had loads of fun.
Finally, we represented the story on a puppet show with the little bears we made. We were amazed to see our very own creations coming to live!
Stories from our Wonderful Wobbler Room
Our wobblers enjoyed learning new vocabulary & Irish traditions for St Patrick’s Day, and painted lots of green artwork.
We made Leprechaun’s mask with paper plates and paint and added a hole in the middle to put their faces in it to become very funny Leprechauns.
We used peppers to paint shamrocks with peppers and used them as stamps the pepper.
To create pots of gold, we used paper plates with black paint and glued yellow paper as the gold in the pot.
For our Shamrocks, using sensorial bags, we mixed colors to paint with our fingers and watched with fascination what was happening inside of the bags.
Our wobblers enjoyed learning new vocabulary & Irish traditions for St Patrick’s Day, and painted lots of green artwork.
We made Leprechaun’s mask with paper plates and paint and added a hole in the middle to put their faces in it to become very funny Leprechauns.
We used peppers to paint shamrocks with peppers and used them as stamps the pepper.
To create pots of gold, we used paper plates with black paint and glued yellow paper as the gold in the pot.
For our Shamrocks, using sensorial bags, we mixed colors to paint with our fingers and watched with fascination what was happening inside of the bags.
For our Zoo topic, our wobblers learned about land & air animals. Wobblers are so interested to know about more about animals and their sounds. So we learned about parrots, foxes, lions, elephants, giraffes and monkeys.
With paper plates and paint we have designed some foxes as part of the land animals.
For messy play, we added Rice Krispies to a box and added our animals in to feed them.
We discovered more about animals that fly, making a parrot, first painting the beak, and then gluing papers simulating the feathers.
For our Puppet Show, we used the puppets that we have in class, and we had such a great story time with them.
We had such fun creating our Easter decorations for our Easter celebrations.
Using bubble wrap for added texture, we made Easter eggs shapes, painted Easter bunnies with crayons and also Easter story time.
It was Darragh’s birthday party in our room, so we made birthday hats and had a dance party and did some baking.
Learning all about the Sky was lovely too. learn about the sky. The children are very interested in this topic, as they look up to the sky when we go to the garden and see different things that really spark their imagination and curiosity. They say goodbye to the clouds and call out the birds. We also sings songs to the sun, and sometimes to the rain to go away.
This got us talking about the sun, moon, stars and planets and Space. We stamped hands with paint to make a rocket and used kitchen foil to create a moon.
We painted stars with crayons and we will stuck a small stick to move them in the sky and bring them home. We loved learning the song “Twinkle Twinkle little star”.
To end with this topic, we made a big sun with glitter, yellow and orange paper. And this is displayed very proudly in our room.
Tales from our Toddler Room
Our toddlers had a great time painting shamrocks, colouring in Leprechauns, and painting green vegetables too for St Patrick’s Day.
For our Dinosaur theme, we used messy paint with blocks to make dinosaurs eggs.
We added sand to our sensory play to hide and find dinosaurs and created a volcano.
To celebrate Easter, our toddlers made a big Easter egg, coloured bunny’s, and even stuck cotton wool on them for their bunny tails.
Together in a group, we painted a chicken to understand where the eggs come from and had an Easter egg hunt in the garden.
For story time, and our Puppet Show we read the story book, “A taste of the moon” and we really enjoyed this.
The story book had animals such as turtle, lion, giraffe, elephant, fox, monkey and rabbits, so with these fresh in our memories, we made drawings of these animals for arts and crafts.
For sensory play, the children will tasted and smelled different fruits and played a play to guess what they are called.
Preschool Room News
Preschool 1
What a lovely time we had in our Pre-school Room, learning of about the traditions of St Patrick’s Day. We made decorations, rainbow and shamrock art, and sang songs too.
We even tried learning Irish dancing, which was lots of fun. We read new stories about Ireland and listened to some Irish music and learned new Irish words too.
For Zoo Week, we did some hand painting to make a giraffe and made an Elephant face craft with geometric shapes and colours.
Using play dough, we made animal figures with a mixture of flour, oil, water and coloured paint to make animals such as snakes, snails and monkeys. We even made a snake with glue eyes and a long tongue.
For Role Play, we created our own Animal Hospital and added real bandages for our animals.
For our Easter Theme, we loved making Easter decorations, and reading Easter themed story books.
Our Educarers made an Easter sensory box for us, with coloured rice in it. They hid Easter chicks and eggs in it for the children to find.
We enjoyed lots of outdoor games too, hopping on one leg and pretending to be bunny rabbits on a hunt for eggs and lettuce.
Our children are eager and fascinated to learn about different countries and cultures. So we created a map of the world and so far, we have been learning about Ireland, France, the United Kingdom, Italy and Spain.
With flash cards of the flags and monuments we talked about these countries, traditions, flags and music. We enjoyed virtual visits to historic city landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower, the Giants Causeway, Pisa and London Bridge.
We made a passport using colourful materials and drew a picture of ourselves so we can travel freely in our room.
For National Pet Day all the children choose their favourite pet and made a lovely picture of it.
Preschool 2
Our Pre-school 2 class also have a fun and busy four weeks, as the learned about St Patrick’s Day and how St Patrick banished the snakes from Ireland many years ago.
The children were talking about shamrocks, snakes, and pots of gold under the rainbow.
We did lots of arts & crafts and we made snakes from paper plates, painted shamrocks, glued gold coins to our rainbows and even used forks to paint beards onto our St Patrick pictures. We dressed in Green and had a party on Tuesday – it was lots of fun.
Our children from PS2 are really interested in shapes, they can recognize most of them by playing with Lego blocks and recreating patterns with a special game prepared for them to improve their fine motor skills and cognitive system.
“Four little corners”, is a story about a square which feels sad because it does not look like his friends the circles. With this story our pre-schoolers have learnt that everyone is different, and we are all friends. And if there is something that makes someone feel sad, we should find a solution so everybody can be happy.
Our Circus was filled with making lots of arts and crafts like clowns, bows with flowers, gymnastics, and lots of songs and musical games were learnt at the same time to work on our motor skills.
We celebrated a “Gardening Day” and learned how a plant grows and even planted lentils in our garden.
They had so much fun being part it the circus and learning about shapes.
The Easter Bunny came to Portmarnock with a bag full of Easter eggs. Our children participated in an Easter Hunt around the garden trying to find all the Easter eggs that were hidden.
They did arts and crafts such as bunny masks, colourful Easter eggs and bunnies using different materials and objects to improve their fine motor skills.
New songs and nursery rhymes will be learned during the whole week so they will have such an amazing time.
Our children from PS2 are really interested in superheroes and how they help everyone with their superpowers defeating the villains and saving the cities and planets.
Everyone from our class will define their superpower and will have the chance to be the “Superspeed helper” In the room.
Lots of games were enjoyed in the garden so they can improve their gross motor skills.
They will did arts and craft like: superheroes bracelets, shields and the most important thing…. A whole city made of recycling materials for them to play in the interest table and dramatic play centre.
After-school Adventures
For St Patrick’s Day, we listened to lots of Irish music and had lots of fun singing and dancing.
We made shamrock art and learned about St Patrick and what the day means.
We also practiced our Irish and read a funny leprechaun book.
For PE we played football in the garden.
For our Circus theme, we did clown, balloon and cotton candy arts and crafts.
We practiced our juggling skills and did gymnastics in the garden and practiced our drawing of the animals you would see in the circus.
For Garden Day we made flowers out of paper.
Our after-school children also enjoyed Easter Camp in April too. We had competitions for drawing and made Easter bunny collages, enjoyed egg hunts and an Easter quiz.
As the weather was lovely too, we enjoyed lots of garden time and using our gross motor skills to run, jump, spin and crawl.
We also discussed the different planets and make our own solar system.
After we learn about the different planets, we had a quiz about what we learned.
