Happy new year to all our parents and children and welcome to our first newsletter of 2020.
It was lovely to see all the children coming back after their Christmas break all refreshed and happy. Our older children were very excited to tell us all about their lovely festive holiday break with their family and friends, and all the lovely gifts they received.
Our new year has started with a jam packed curriculum, full of learning and fun. We enjoyed lots of activities exploring our five senses, and learned about the impacts of pollution and the importance of recycling.
We also celebrated Chinese New Year too and made some lovely arts and crafts for this festive event.
Here is a breakdown of what we got up it, and some photos too.
As of February, our newsletters will be available and distributed to parents every two months. So the next newsletter for Seabrook Manor will be the February edition, then April, and so on. Thank you and we look forward to continuing to share all our news and stories with you through our newsletters.
In the meantime, we hope you enjoy this read, and don’t forget to follow us on Facebook and Instagram, (links below).
Best wishes,
Jolita
Jolita Vascenkatie
Crèche Manager
Baby Room News
Our little babies have been settling in well as they returned from their Christmas holidays at the start of the month. They loved exploring different textures of sand, paper, paint and playdoh and weren’t afraid to get their fingers and toes messy. During National Jelly Day, they also got to explore jelly (many for the first time), and they adored the squishy feeling and sounds it made when they made it in between their little fingers.
Story time is always a hit with our babies. They love looking at the pictures and following the patterns of the textured books.
It is also a nice way for them to relax in the reading nooks with their Educarers.
For song time, some babies get very animated and excited when their Educarer starts singing their favourite nursery rhymes and songs.
We all enjoyed doing hand and foot prints too for our art corner.
Wobbler Room News
Wobbler Room 1—
Our wobbler children in Wobbler Room 1 celebrated the start of the new year with lots of singing and dancing. We also made a footprint calendar to mark the turn of the new decade. We also learned a new song all about the months of the year and we are learning all about who’s birthdays fall on each month.
With the weather being cold, but crisp and bright, we wrapped up warm and cosy and enjoyed lots of outdoor play.
Our circus themed event was a big hit amongst our wobblers. They used all their creativity to make a big top for our circus and together with the help of their Educarer, they printed it in lots of lovely bright colours. Next we painted a clown to stick onto our big top. This has our handprints on them, and is placed in our room. We will be able to compare the sizes of our handprints in a couple of months’ time and see how big we have grown. We have learnt about jugglers too and enjoyed trying to imitate our Educarers as they juggled some balls. Later we used some small balls to spread paint and make some lovely textured artwork.
And just like the circus professionals, we tried our hand at tightrope walking, and with help from our Educarers, we pretended we were walking on a tightrope, with a string placed flat on the floor. It was a great way for our wobbler children to improve their balancing skills. They proved to be very good at it indeed.
Story books and reading is one of the many favourite pass times for our wobblers, and during Book Day, we enjoyed lots of reading and storytelling with our Educarers. We also did some role play too and pretended to act our the “Three Little Pigs” story.
Exploring our little fingers and toes was fun, as we smugged paint all over our hands and feet and made our own hand and foot prints on paper and creating a mural for our wall. We are all so proud of it. Using our fingers, we got to feel lots of different textures of food and items.
To celebrate the Chinese New Year of the Rat, we coloured in our Rat pictures and made a friendly dragon for our wall collage.
We have been learning about traffic lights and decorated our classroom with a big traffic light that we made. We earned some colours too, include red, yellow, green. Our Educarers took our traffic lights out into the garden and we practiced stopping and going, with some of our wobblers on cars and bikes.
Towards the end of the month, we had Favourite Character Day, where we got to dress up as our much loved character for the day. This was lots of fun, and it encouraged our children to role play and play together.
Wobbler Room 2—
This month in wobbler’s 2 the children had great fun learning all about transport traffic lights and roads we read some stories about the roads and our favourite was the ‘toad road code’. We had great fun doing art about the road and made our own wobbler road with our footprints. We played lots of games in the garden with the cars and made red stop signs and green go signs to play a game with.
We also learned lots about the circus, which was really fun, as we got to create our own circus in the class. Our Educarers attempted some tricks such as juggling and ‘walking a tight rope”. The children really enjoyed this and we created different animals that might be in a circus and created some clowns with our hand prints. We also had our very own obstacle course in the garden which the children loved as well as our Educarers who set it up.
This month has been great fun and our favourite song is “five little monkeys jumping on a bed” as it has been requested anytime we are singing in the class.
Toddler Room News
Our busy and active toddlers kept us all on our toes, as we had the best fun with lots of themed events to keep them interested and engaged all month long.
They all loved it when we had a pirate themed day at the start of the month, where we made pirate hats and painted some pirate ships with our fingers. It was hilarious to role play this theme with our toddlers. They are so animated and engrossed in play, especially when they are interested in the topic. They particularly enjoyed mimicking the typical sounds of a pirate and it was firm favourite thing to do on the day.
Our toddlers are so curious at this age and they love it when we are doing activities that relate to their fingers and toes. From singing songs about them, to practising our pincer grasps and getting foot tickles from our Educarers to make them laugh, it’s an activity which is a joy for our Educarers to witness with our toddlers. They were so fascinated when we were learning how to pick up some complex items with our fingers and then they were even trying to do the same task with their toes! It was very funny.
We also enjoyed learning about the circus and traffic lights too, where we walked “to the circus” and stopped at our homemade traffic lights. They all waited for the green man to give us the signal to go before we crossed the road safely to “the circus”, and we all had a great day.
Chinese New Year was also celebrated with our children, with lots of painting and arts and crafts. Dragons, rats and lanterns were coloured in abundance to mark the lunar new year of the Rat.
Preschool Room News
Some events we enjoyed in Preschool included:
* Musical Day
* 5 Senses
* Recycling and Pollution
* Chinese New Year
January has been a month super busy.
All our pre-school children were very busy learning about different things such as recycling, pollution, the human body, the human skeleton, and our five senses. Exploring these topics provided the children with the opportunity to explore and develop personal skills such as counting, identifying, problem solving skills and decision-making skills.
Our preschool children have such a keen interest in music and musical instruments. They are always so excited when we learn new songs and they are always so curious and eager to learn about different musical instruments and sounds.
Our Educarers make sure then as part of the curriculum and events, it includes activities of learning that our children are most engaged in, which is why then we all decided to have a musical concert in class. Our children were delighted to hear this and we made some musical arts and crafts for our walls. We drew ukuleles and guitars and stuck colourful paper on them and we listened to some classical music while painting. The children found this very relaxing.
Discussing about the differences between noise, sound and music was interesting, and talking about how music made us feel was nice too. It was extra special then when we were treated to a violin lesson with Darío our Educarer. Darío brought in his violin and the children all took turns in having a go after the lesson. They were super gentle with the instrument. As we were also learning all about our five senses at the same time, it was nice to be able to explore our sense of hearing and sound during our musical concert and lesson.
Sensorial boxes that we created for our five senses learning saw us put different items and objects into the boxes and we talked about the feelings and textures of them. We made some slime too and talked about the textures and sliminess of it.
We also learned about recycling and pollution and the small differences we can all make at home and in crèche to help save the planet. For Chinese New Year, we made lots of colourful arts and lanterns to decorate our room.
For Jelly Day, we got to taste some very yummy jelly flavours.
In preschool 2, we celebrated Robyns birthday and did some baking to celebrate. Then the star award of the week went to James for doing so well on his potty training.
We made our own bins out of recycled boxes and learned how to use them. We had a lot of conversations about it and we asked the children tell us what they think they can do by helping the earth to be a cleaner place. Using a circle shape insets, we drew the earth and painted it. We then drew our hands, cut them out and stuck them onto the earth to represent our healing hands . We make a happy earth crown, with children own ideas about how to save the earth.
We also talked about pollution and the things that can happen if we don’t change out ways. We make two big water collages and we added black paint to one, which represented the dirty/polluted water. Our children made the most lovely display about a happy world versus a sad world.
Thank you, parents, for bringing recyclable materials as it enabled us to make a big robot from them.
For our dental hygiene learning, we explained to the children how important it is to take care of our teeth.
Naíscoil Room News
This month in Naiscoil we explored our five senses by performing different activities and experiments that would define each of our senses. For example we looked at our taste sense by carrying out ‘food tasting’ with samples of strong and mild flavours such as Lemon, rice krispies, banana, ginger etc. The children were so brave closing their eyes and tasting the variety of flavours. some they liked the taste of and some they DID NOT!! We explored our sense of sound by zoning in on rhythm and beats with our musical instruments and we even made some new sounds! We continued through all our senses in a fun way and we will continue to refer to them daily.
From our five senses we moved to learning about recycling. We gathered lots of empty household cartons and bottles for dramatic play and used our larger cardboard boxes we created “WALLY” our much-loved recycling robot! We created recycling bins in our classroom – green for paper, black for rubbish and brown for food waste. We also created a grey bottle bank! We created collages on our boxes and we made beautiful flowers when we were talking about how you can put grass and flowers into the brown bin too! It really interested and excited the children as they could make links from their home life and there creche life to all of the above topics and came in each day with new ideas and thoughts on how we can better our environment!
Afterschool Room News
This month in senior after schoolers we decided to keep track of everyone’s birthday, so we made a big birthday cake for the notice board, where all the afterschool children designed their own candle to put on top of it.
We also engaged in some arts and crafts for Chinese new year. This included creating some Chinese lanterns and some scary looking dragons. We all enjoyed creating our own unique dragons.
Since a few of the after schoolers like football so much, we have decided we will make a mini football pitch especially for the rainy days when they can’t go outside. This will use all the creativity of the after schoolers as they create it in their own style.
We also enjoyed lots of role play, including our doctors and nurses role play with all our friends.
