Dear Parents & Guardians ,

We would like to give a warm welcome to you all, as we returned back to crèche this month.

It has been so wonderful seeing all our Links children again, and it has been great to see that they have settled back so well after being apart from us for the past few months.

We understand that it must be difficult for you as parents to now be restricted when it comes to entering the crèches during drop off and collections, due to the current HSE Covid 19 guidelines. But we hope that, through the photos we share here in our monthly newsletter, the weekly updates and through our social media pages, that you can see what fun the children are all having together in their Pods. They are very engaged in the daily activities we set out for them, and equally we are guided by them when it comes to interests and learning.

Our Educarers listen to the children and with any emerging interests, we will build on a theme based on the children’s interests.  For example, during our Summer theme this month, we spoke about summer holidays, beach days and various items of clothing that one might wear on a hot sunny day. One child then told us that he went camping during his time at home with his family in his back garden. Within an hour, a tent was created, a pretend fire pit “lit”, and camping songs were sung, as we enjoyed a lovely role play all about going camping.

We continue to practice all our safety measures to help keep viruses at bay. Regular hand washing is done, with our children singing their hand washing song whilst doing it. We have included our Hand Washing Song here too, if you wish to practice it at home to with your child.

All our chefs are so happy to see our children back too and they are delighted to be back cooking healthy, homemade and super tasty food for all our children.

Charlie, our Head Chef has shared a recipe in this newsletter with you all for his Chicken Broccoli Pasta dish, which is a big hit with all our children, and which is on our Summer / Autumn dinner menu. As the children love it so much, we thought it would be nice for you to make it at home too for your little ones. We hope you all enjoy.

Best Wishes,

Elaine

Elaine Dunne—Creche Manager

Extra safety measures have been put in place throughout the creche to help keep the spread of Covid 19 at bay.

Toys & all surfaces and items are cleaned regularly and we have hand

sanitisers and wash basins for children, at their height levels, that they can access easily. All our rooms are organised into Pods & our children are settling in nicely into them.

Baby Room News

This month we welcomed four new babies to our baby room Alex, Elise, Noa and Jamie.

All four have settled in so well. They were kept busy with plenty of activities carried out such as animal planet day, Musical Fun, summer festivals and Rainbow Day. We also did lots of painting, reading our new books and going to the garden, which the babies love.

We also celebrated Jamie’s first birthday. His friends made him a lovely card and a crown.

Wobbler Room News

Our first month back in creche after lockdown was very good.

We were all excited to see all our friends again. We had a welcome back to creche party for the children but also had a goodbye party for Chloe as she moved up to Toddler’s.

We celebrated summer festival by painting crabs with our hands and made a big blue sea.

The younger wobblers had learnt new words and explored all different textures, our wobblers are becoming more independent each week and are also ready to play.

Toddler Room News

This month, Chloe moved from wobblers to toddlers. She is so happy to be back with all her old friends.

We were very busy with our activities this month, with lots of enjoyable arts and crafts such as painting pasta and making necklaces with them. We had the chance to celebrate Christmas again so we listened to Christmas songs all day and made Christmas trees.

We also picked our name for our pod – “clever cats”, and we made little cats with our handprints and decorated them with pom poms.

We had lots of Garden time and we learnt to play new games such as What Time is it Mr Wolf” and “Ring a Ring a Rosey”.

The children love to have water play so they got the animals and played with them in the water.

We also celebrated Ivy’s 2nd birthday and our lovely Educator’s Natalia’s Birthday too.

Preschool Room News

Preschool 1:

This month in preschool for our summer camp we learnt all about “our families”. We talked about our brothers/sisters, grandparents, cousins and if we had any family pets.

A fun activity we did was to make animal masks. Everyone wanted to be a lion. We enjoyed role playing with our Jungle games, all pretending to be lions. They were all going around on all fours and roaring like lions. The children really enjoyed this, they thought they were very scary.

We also had a Musical Day, where we had music playing on our CD player and we all sang along to the songs and made our music with the musical instruments.

We celebrated Summer Festival Day, and the children dressed in their best summer clothes. We also had a Rainbow Day, where the children dressed in lovely bright colours and we also painted our own rainbows with lovely bright colours.

Planting our own seeds was fun and we love to watch them grow every week. They are coming along so well, and the children are so happy with what they have done.

We also celebrated Oliver’s birthday too!

 

Preschool 2:

We came back to creche after spending a long time at home. We were excited, and we could not wait to play with all our friends again. Although some have not come back yet, and some are not coming back we miss them all but we are continuing to learn and play.

The first week in our summer camp we learnt about “Our Families”. So we did arts and crafts like drawing our families, our pets and our country flags. We also enjoyed multi activities in our Summer Camp, where we played games such as: Mr Wolf, obstacle courses, hide and seek, spinner race and dancing.

During the second week we learnt about Animal Planets and we celebrated “my beast and animal day”, so we did activities such as Mr Wrinkles, role play by making animal sounds and playing “Jungle”, animal handprints and animal masks. Each child had their favourite animal masks and did a great job making them all colourful.

For Art attack and soccer game, we got all different toys such as marbles, cups, Legos pieces and dipped them into paint, placed them onto blank paper to watch the effects that the objects make on the paint.

For our soccer games we played Simon says, wall ball, monkey in the middle and we also design our own jerseys.

The third week was all about “fun and fitness” and we also celebrated “musical festival day”. We had one day only were we got to celebrate Christmas again, so we made some Christmas crafts and danced around to some Christmas songs.

For our fun and fitness theme, the children learnt all about healthy and non-healthy foods.

We played an abundance of games such as Mr wolf, traffic light games, we made our own obstacles course, made yoga bags and practiced our yoga moves.

Dance and drama are a big hit, so we celebrated a musical festival day with lots of dancing and drama. We played drama warm up games such as, balance games, jumping games and cooperative stand up and piggy in the middle.

The fourth week we did “young scientists” so explored with some experiments such as “lava lamps”, mixing colours, pepper and water (the importance of washing our hands) and mixing oil and water. All the children got science awards for their amazing experiments.

On the 22nd we celebrated Summer Day by making handprints and making a summer fruit bowl and pot.

The children played some GAA games such as hand to hand roll, bounce, throw and dripple, bridge ball, duck, duck, goose and over the river. The children also learnt how to bake some delicious cookie and we made our own bubbles.

Towards the end of the month, we enjoyed our Imaginarium theme, where we did some junk art making. We also celebrated Rainbow Day. The children all decorated lovely rainbows, by cutting up small papers and gluing them to a blank page. With using our classroom toys the children made a colourful rainbow.

 

Cooking Corner—Chicken & Broccoli Pasta

This recipe is from Charlie, Links Head Chef, and based in Links Abington. It is on our Summer Menu and our children totally love it. It is a great way to get protein and vegetables in at the same time, and who doesn’t love pasta?

Some children have told us that they have missed our Chef’s homemade food, despite them also loving mum & dads food whilst they were at home too.  Our children are very diplomatic!

You will need:

  • 300g good quality fusilli pasta
  • 250g of broccoli florets, cut small (we call these our little trees in creche and when we eat them, we grow big & tall!)
  • 200g of cooked chicken
  • 60g of parmesan cheese
  • 40g of butter
  • Glug of olive oil

Add your pasta to a large pot of very lightly salted boiled water. (Cook your pasta according to the packet instructions. )

When it comes to the boil , add your broccoli and cook for 8-10 minutes.

Reserve a cup of the cooking water, then drain the pasta and the broccoli.

Add butter and some oil to the pot on a high heat.

When it starts to sizzle, carefully (as it may spit), add the reserved water. This will form an emulsion. Add your chicken and heat through.

Add your pasta & broccoli back into the pot and stir into the butter and oil mix.

Add your parmesan cheese, turn off the heat and keep stirring until your sauce is lovely and glossy and coating all the cooked ingredients.

Serve with a sprinkle of parmesan cheese and watch your children devour it!

Enjoy!