AUTUMN NEWSLETTER 2025

AUTUMN NEWS LETTER 2025 -- Look what we’ve been up to!

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!

Aistear in our Curriculum

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.

Identity & Belonging focuses on children developing a strong sense of who they are and feel valued, respected, and connected to others in their community

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 “This is Me”, “Some Families”, “I have 10 little fingers” and “5 little fishes”. We love to dance, singing to “Hop little Bunny”, “Circle Song” and our favourite "The floor is lava"

Communication supports children in expressing themselves, understanding others, and developing confidence in using language and various forms of communication to share ideas and experiences.

We share our experiences with our friends, talking about the things that are important to us. We listen carefully as our friends tell their stories, showing respect and interest in what they have to say. We take turns speaking and ask questions to learn more.

We read stories in the cosy area like “Scary Sid” “Peppa Pig”, “Winnie the Witch”, “A Squash & a Squeeze” and lots more.

We talk about who’s in our family and we made our family book which has pictures of our families in, when we feel lonely or miss our families, we can look at it, this helps our children feel secure, valued, and connected by celebrating their families and giving them comfort and a sense of belonging

Exploring and Thinking encourages children to make sense of the world around them by investigating, questioning, experimenting, and using their curiosity to develop understanding and problem-solving skills.

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 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’ve also been learning all about hibernation and why some animals go to sleep for the winter. We went on a nature walk to collect leaves for our hedgehog to hibernate, 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.

We planted some daffodils and crocus bulbs; first we cleaned up the garden pulling all the weeds, then we planted the bulbs deep so they’ll be warm in the winter. We can’t wait to watch them grow in the spring.

Rufus and Hand Hygiene

We have been learning all about washing our hands, we wash them after we use the toilet, before we eat our food and when we play outside or with our pets.

Our germ experiment

We experimented how germs can be passed if we don’t wash our hands. Using Vaseline and glitter we shook hands and watch how the “germs” passed from one to the other just by shaking hands.

We learned how important it is to "catch our cough and sneeze" in our elbow, to keep everyone safe

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 give 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 solving, math skills and much more. We’ve been learning all about our body’s and how they work, we learnt a great song called “them bones, them dancing bones” teaching us about our body’s.

Next term we will participate in Science Week, we will have lots of cool experiments to participate in, building our understanding of key STEM concepts through hands on discovery.

A HUGE THANK YOU TO YOU ALL FOR HELPING US MAKE OUR PYJAMA DAY A BIG SUCCESS.

We raised €855 for Spina Bifida Hydrocephalus Ireland a charity close to our hearts and had a great day wearing our pj’s in playschool. We had a big breakfast with lots of fruit, toast and cereal, brought our teddies and blankets and played so great games.

Fire safety

Each month we practice our fire drill, when the alarm goes off, we walk to the safe spot in the garden. We don’t wait to put our coats on, we don’t gather up our toys. We wait in our line until it is safe to go back in. our senior class is very good at practicing it, and our junior class will be learning all about how to stay safe when the fire alarm rings in the new term.

Lisa’s Cake Treat

We had a lovely visit from Lisa at “Sugar Coated” by Lisa who delivered this fabulous cake she kindly gifted to us for the boys and girls for their Halloween parties for all their fundraising efforts for Pyjama day yesterday

Halloween

We had great fun dressing up for Halloween, we made some spooky toast, made some bubble caldrons, and had great fun with the tuff tray.

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.