WOW what a great September and October we have had, it was great seeing all our boys and girls coming to playschool, saying goodbye to our mammies and daddies at the gate (we know how hard that is) and having FUN!
Autumn – Exploring & Thinking
Have you seen the colours on the trees; we have been looking at the trees and how the leaves change colour in Autumn, we even learned a song about it “The leaves are falling down”. We also love dancing to the song “The Dingle Dangle Scarecrow”. We can feel the cold air and need to wear our coats when we go outside, we can see the cobwebs in the hedges and on the railings, where the spiders make their homes for the winter. we made some great spiders for our walls, counted all their legs, and even looked at what they eat.
We’ve also been learning all about hibernation and why some animals go to sleep for the winter. we read some great books like “Adventures on the Farm -Hedgehogs” and “Don’t hog the hedge”. We also went on a nature walk to collect leaves for our hedgehog to hibernate, we painted a box for him, he’s gone to sleep now we’ll see him in the spring. We did some great cutting and gluing and painting making our own hibernating hedgehog for our special books.
Our Curriculum
Linking in all learning about Autumn, our curriculum focuses on our bodies, why we need to wear a coat as the weather gets colder, looking at the animals and how they live we also look at our bodies, this term we focus on the skeleton, did you know the biggest bone is in our thighs and the smallest bone is in our ears. Without our bones we wouldn’t be able to stand up or sit down. We have a great song “Them dancing Bones”, it tells us all about the bones in our bodies and how they are all connected to each other
Our bones are held together with muscles, the muscles help us to move around.
Our bodies need lots of food to stay healthy and next term we will be focusing our curriculum on healthy eating and how this benefits our bodies.
We also spoke about the importance of exercise for our bodies and even had a visit from the local GAA football groups showing our senior session some great exercise with footballs.
Aistear
The theme wellbeing is about children being confident, happy and healthy.
As the children start or return to playschool, we focus on ourselves, our families and getting to know our new friends in playschool.
We are getting very independent, able to find our own pictures and hang up our coats and bags, getting our own lunch and tidying up after it. We are learning to put on our own coats before going to the garden to play. We are also super good at clean up time, helping to put away the toys, and wiping the tables for lunch.
We are learning to recognise how we are feeling too, sometimes we feel sad but most times we are happy. We drew self-portraits, made some great houses for our family pictures, spoke about our families in circle time and sang a song called “Who’s Here Today” which helps us learn each other’s names forming a sense of Identity & Belonging in playschool. We learnt some great poems too, like “I have 10 little fingers” “some families” and “5 little fishes”
Communication: we share our experiences, listening as our friends tell us their story, taking turns and asking questions.
Rufus
Wash your hands with Rufus
We love learning how to wash our hands with Rufus, he has a great story book and song to help us remember to wash our hands after going to the toilet and before we eat our food.
We did an experiment on germs and how quickly they spread so it’s really important we wash our hands before lunch and after using the toilet. https://www.safefood.net/food-safety-kids/handwashing
Keeping us safe -- Fire Drill
We are so good at practicing our fire drill, the first time we thought it was a little noisy, but we know when we hear the sound we go to our safe spot in the garden.
We chat in circle time about what the children think they should do if they hear the alarm, did you know we don’t get our coats or bags we just leave what we are doing and walk outside.
Outside we stand in a line and wait for our name to be called before going back inside.
Science
Children are naturally drawn to the things that make them curious. we hope to challenge their curiosity introducing lots of fun science experiments and play activities for them to explore.
Science experiments gives us the opportunity to build on our communication skills, work together as a team, improve our hand-eye coordination, gross and fine motor skills, problem solve, math skills and much more.
Watch this space!
Super Hero Day
We are celebrating Super Hero Day on Thursday 24th & Friday 25th October. A huge thank you to all our parents for their support. Super Hero Day raises money for Special Olympics Ireland.
We hope to have a great day dressing up as super heroes. At circle time we spoke about how we can be super heroes to our friends by looking after them and sharing and helping others, the children have some great ideas on how they can help their friends
Next Term
As winter approaches and the weather gets colder, it’s not going to stop us going outside to play and having a choice to decide what we want to play with. Deciding where and what we want to play helps our confidence grow and helps us find our voice in the world. Play engages, motivates, challenges and
teaches us, but most importantly IT’S FUN.
Our curriculum this term will continue with healthy eating, supporting our learning of the body and what healthy food can do for it.
We will continue to support each child’s pre writing development, numeracy skills, shapes and colours.
As we learn all about our body’s we will also learn about our emotions and how to express and deal with them. Our emotional and mental health is just as important as our physical health.
Emerging Interest Board
Next term our emerging interest board will be outside for you to write your child’s emerging interest in and or any learning you would like us to include in our curriculum. It was a great success last year and we hope to build on that this year.
Midterm
Just a reminder that we are closed next week for midterm break we will reopen on Monday 4th November, hope you all have a relaxing week off.
HAPPY HALLOWEEN
EVERYONE!
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