It’s all about Easter this week at The Children’s House; we will be doing Easter crafts – making Easter egg wishes for our class tree & painting hands & feet to make Easter art, & towards the end of the week the children will be doing fun activities like bunny bag races in the garden, as well as of course the traditional Easter egg hunt!! We hope you all are looking forward to a wonderful Easter break ahead!

Easter Bunny Poem

Welcome back after the long weekend everyone, we hope you had a great St Patrick’s Day & Mother’s Day! This week in The Children’s House we’ll be learning all about the sense of sound, & doing a lot of fun games, music & activities to explore this sense. We will be singing the Wheels on the Bus using Lámh signs (this is the hand signing system in Ireland), & learning about loud & soft sounds. The children will be playing games of ‘guess that sound’ – isolating the sense of sound & listening without seeing what’s making the sound e.g. from objects in a box. We will be playing musical instruments, using the sound boxes Montessori activity (matching sounds of different volumes) & making paper cup phones! The children will also be listening to different types of music to see what the sounds make them think of, or what feeling it gives them.

Happy Seachtain na Gaeilge everyone, agus Beannachtaí na Féile Pádraig! As we celebrate the Irish language this week in a lead up to St Patrick’s Day on Friday, the children will be learning an Irish poem about the body & enjoying doing Irish dancing. We  will also be talking about the story of St Patrick and doing arts & crafts for St Patrick’s Day as well as Mother’s Day on Sunday – a short but busy week ahead!

Lámh, lámh eile

Lámh, lámh eile, a haon, a dó,           (Hand, other hand, one, two)
Cos, cos eile, a haon, a dó.                  (Leg, other leg, one, two)
Súil, súil eile, a haon, a dó,                 (Eye, other eye, one, two,)
Cluas, cluas eile, a haon, a dó,           (Ear, other ear, one, two,)
Ceann, srón, béal, smig,                      (Head, nose, mouth, chin,)
Agus fiacla bána i mo bhéal istigh.   (And white teeth inside my mouth.)

We’re learning all about the sense of touch this week at The Children’s House – the children will be learning about how things feel using our senses, e.g. hot or cold, rough or smooth, hard or soft…we will be looking at textures of things in our environment like clothes we wear and toys we play with indoors & outdoors. The children will explore & find different textures all around them, & we will be doing Montessori activities like the Touch Boards (graded sandpaper from rough to smooth), Touch Fabrics (matching pairs of fabrics with eyes closed), Geometric Solids (feeling 3 dimensional shapes with eyes closed & guessing if they roll or not). We will also be playing games like Feather Tickle, & doing a Sensory Walking Mat. It’s really lovely to isolate & use our sense of touch in this way, & promises to be such an interesting & fun week!!

Sense of Touch (poem)

Skin, skin, we’re covered in skin,
Skin gives our sense of touch,
Skin, skin, we’re covered in skin,
Skin can touch so much…

Touch is feeling,
Hot or cold,
Touch is feeling,
Rough or smooth,
Touch is feeling,
Hard or soft for me…