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
This month in the baby room we learned about parts of the body. We used different materials to highlight the parts of the body such as paint on our hands and feet.
Our babies really liked the tickling of the paint brush on their toes. We also used these hands and footprints to make pretty flowers to brighten our room.
With the arrival of new babies to our room we updated our family tree to welcome everyone and make them feel at home.
We got some new dolls in the baby room and the babies are playing with them and exploring the new editions with great interest.
We also started learning about all types of animals and the noises they make. The Educarers are having great fun with this also. We also started to learn new songs this month the
babies are having great fun clapping away.
News from our Wobbler Room
This month in the Wobbler Room we are learning about fingers and toes. We are exploring the sense of touch and using different things such as feathers paint and cars to run
up and down their feet the stimulate their senses.
To represent Winter, we have been playing with ice, and we are touching tasting and playing with the ice on the table. We went out the garden and shook our little bodies out for
Fit Day. We jumped, danced, and hopped and rode our bikes and jiggled to start our fit January. We have also been learning songs in Spanish and English.
Our favourite song now is Daddy Finger, and we love saying all the people in our family. We are also reading stories and using puppets to help expand the stories. We also made
our own Wobbler Theatre, which we loved to do. Our Wobblers got new dolls and we are so excited about the dolls and the rest of our new toys there are spending hours
exploring.
What Have Our Toddlers Been Up To?
Lots of things, as our Educarers prepared a lot of lovely activities for us to explore and enjoy.
Our Toddler Room children made a busy month settling back in to crèche after Christmas. We made school buses and the children were so interested in transport and school
that we put the two interests together and made some amazing art.
One of the biggest interests this month had to be dinosaurs, and the children all found a common interest. In this, Manuel and Irene came up with idea of comparing the
children’s feet to dinosaurs’ feet. The children were so amazed by this and this led to us playing games that involved ‘walking through the jungle’, looking for dinosaurs.
It was a lovely activity as it brought the room learning outside.
Exploring our senses was lots of fun too. Our wobblers tasted a lot of weird, strange, tasty, and not so tasty foods, but not before they felt and smelt it first.
With the new year upon us, we welcomed it by going out and getting fit for our Fun & Fit Day. We made an obstacle course, and we battled our way up and down the slide and
steps. We were so tired after and we needed a big rest and lots of water.
Best of luck to Ada, who moved to Preschool and we missed our friends who stayed at home this month. We hope to see them all again soon and we hope they try out the same
activities at home, that we have been going in crèche.
Preschool Room Adventures
Our children welcomed our New Year in crèche, and we celebrated New Year’s Resolutions. We talked about how some of our children saw fireworks in the sky over the festive
holiday, so we decided to do an art project with chalk and make fireworks.
Our children in Preschool 2 talked about being excited about starting Primary School later this year, and about new skills that they want to learn this year too.
We also talked about the gifts that all the children received over Christmas. They were so excited to tell our Educarers, and for fun we drew a picture of our favourite ones received.
Helen and Natalia had to guess what the children got. We enjoyed this laughing at this, as Helen and Natalia got a good few of them incorrect.
It was such fun exploring the themes of Five Senses, the Human Body and Recycling as part of our monthly curriculum.
Five Senses:
For our Five Senses learning, we discovered so much. Our children were amazed by the different tastes and smells that they discovered when focusing on them. We closed our eyes
and did some senses activities to explore different textures and smells.
As well as our Curriculum learning, we enjoyed Fit & Fun Day, Inventors Day and Puzzle Day too.
For Fit & Fun Day, we enjoyed Yoga, balance games and obstacle courses in the garden. We shock off the cobwebs and got out and danced, played, jumped and skipped – anything to get our bodies moving and active. Natalia in Preschool 2 has also showed us some new aerobics moves, which we enjoyed daily, and we will build this into our daily schedule in the future too.
In Preschool 1, we used Me and My World to learn about the human body and used pasta to make art. And to challenge our brains, we enjoyed lots of new puzzles and jigsaws.
