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.

Jolita Vascenkatie – Crèche Manager

Activities from our Baby Room

Our babies love story-time and in March, they thoroughly enjoyed The Hungry Caterpillar. We used toy fruits that are featured in the story book to count numbers and explore colours. We painted with apples too, using them as stamps and sang songs with actions in them to point to our facial and body features.

For St Patrick’s Day, we created Shamrocks and painted Irish flags too.

For our Shapes learning, we painted cardboards and created cubes and pyramids inside a sensory box. We build with cubes, blocks and pyramids in front of the mirror to explore reflections, and we played with dough to make shapes (squares, circles, triangles) with the help of different objects such as rolls of paper and toys.

The sunshine was lovely, so we played in the garden with open cubes where they can put objects like flowers in and out of the cubes. We made tunnels in the garden too and
practised our crawling. Continuing on from our shapes learning, we read stories about shapes and during Easter, we painted posters with different shapes on it.

Our babies enjoyed exploring different types of brushes (comb, hairbrush, toothbrush) in front of the mirror. They also brushed toys and their own hair. We used our sensory box to explore more and added water and brushes to it so we could wash our toys, and we painted with toothbrushes.

For Pet Day we play with our soft toy animals and looked at pictures of our pets.

 

 

 

 

Stories from our Wonderful Wobbler Room

Our Junior Wobblers enjoyed sensory water and made cloud and rain art craft with coloured water and cottonwool.

For St Patrick’s Day, we made Leprechaun masks and flags and had a parade in our room.

Dinosaurs is a big hit in our room. We made a big volcano and a dinosaur forest, where we hunted for dinosaur eggs and dinosaur prints.

We planted some flowers for our Gardening Day and took turns giving them water.

For our Food and Easter theme, we made Easter egg, bunny rabbit and chick art. We loved making 3D easter eggs made with cornflour and glue.

We enjoyed our push and pull actions with our racing cars and had a race with our friends.

Our Senior Wobblers loved playing with their construction toys, and they made a big house out of cardboard. They also learned about numbers, colours, animals, and
transports through story books and flash cards.

For our animals and pets’ theme, we made posters of our favourite animals and imitated their sounds and movements

We painted cars and aeroplanes and used our lovely new garden as a circuit for our races.

 

 

 

 

 

Tales from our Toddler Room

Our Toddlers love “going to the Zoo”, so we painted a box and made it into a zoo for our animal friends. Using our handprints, we made monkeys and flamingos and read a
book about ocean aquatic animals.

This really sparked an interested in our children about this topic, so we painted an ocean with a lot of fish and sea creatures.

For our Space learning, we talked about the Planets and made a large mural with all the planets, the sun and moon on it. We also created a space rocket astronaut.

 

 

 

Preschool & Naíscoil Room News

Preschool 1

With Spring well and truly in bloom, our Pre-school children loved learning all about insects and mini beasts. We made lady bugs and bumble bees and created a Spring collage for display.

For our Day and Night theme, we talked about our day and night time routines and explored night animals, such as owls, foxes, mice and spiders.

It was so exciting when we learned about planets and Space, and we made a space display with rockets, aliens and stars. The children also made their own space and planet books.

Preschool 2

Dinosaurs are always a hot topic in our room. We love learning about dinosaur’s food and their habitat. We made dinosaur handprints and footprints and played with our dino toys too.

For the Solar system, we loved learning about the planets, stars and rockets and we made a big space poster with the moon, sun, the planets, stars, astronauts, and rockets.

Naíscoil

In Naiscoil, we have covered the following topics in the last month.

Arctic Animals
We spent time exploring arctic animals like penguins, polar bears and the arctic fox. We made a mural about what the arctic might look like. We made igloos and ice and snowflakes and transformed our display wall into a cool arctic creation!

The Gruffalo Book Review

The children love the book of the Gruffalo, we used masks to act out the story in drama class and recreated through art the animals in the story. We made a giant cardboard Gruffalo and his child to stay in our room with us and join in at story time. We know this book off by heart and love how it rhymes!

Easter Celebrations

For easter celebrations we decorated our room in beautifulpastel colours, we made cards bunnies, eggs and baby chicks to take home!

Space, Rockets and Shapes

This week we are learning about space, rockets and shapes using our pink insets to define spaces and create shapes into rocket ships. We painted paper plates and are learning
the names of the planets!

 

 

 

 

 

After-school Adventures

In our lovely new Garden, our After-school children drew what we think is in our gardens at home. We also made butterflies and ladybirds out of paper plates.

For our Easter theme, we made a big easter poster of the Easter Bunny and enjoyed lots of Easter games.

On Pet Day we talked about the pets we have at home. One of our after-school friends has a cat called Flower, and they loved talking to their friends about Flower and what Flower likes to get up it. We drew and coloured pictures of animals and pets and made a pet collage together.

Space is always interesting for our children to learn about. We explored different planets and made rockets, aliens, and the solar system.