December 16 2018

“You’re Under Arrest”…..in Ms. Olson’s Senior Infants!

Our theme for the month of November was ‘Jobs’ and what an interesting month it was! In Aistear, we had a Garda Station role play corner which we really loved! We had to answer all the 999 calls and dispatch the guards to different situations. We had a Garda car to take us to those emergencies and we even had a cell to hold the prisoners! We also had to fill out incident forms and take finger-prints. It was a lot of fun!

We also made Emergency Services puppets in Aistear. We made Guards, Mountain Rescuers, Paramedics and Firefighters. Take a look at our creations!

In Literacy we read and did lots of work on two different stories related to our theme – ‘Lost and Found’ by Oliver Jeffers and ‘The Little Red Hen’ by Michael Foreman. These stories show how people help us. In ‘Lost and Found’ the little boy helps the penguin find his way home and in ‘The Little Red Hen’, the hen makes new friends who help her to make bread. We spent a lot of time developing our comprehension skills such as predicting, questioning and summarising when reading these stories, as well as analysing and dramatizing the feelings of the characters. We also wrote a of list of things we thought the little boy and the penguin might need on their trip to the South Pole!

In S.E.S.E we learnt all about jobs. We realised that there are so many different jobs that people do in the world and we had a think about what we would like to be when we grow up. We also learnt about the Emergency Services and the different work that they do. Probably the most interesting part of our month was when we devised questions to interview our parents about their jobs. We practised our interviewing skills in school beforehand by conducting mock interviews in pairs and then we interviewed our parents for homework. We loved hearing about the work that our parents do and we want to say a big thank you to our parents for letting us interview them!

In Music, we learnt lots of songs surrounding our theme such as ‘What shall we do in our work today?’ and ‘Harry was a fireman’. In Art, we made Emergency Services vehicles out of egg carton boxes. Take a look!

Finally we were busy preparing for our Christmas play – ‘What a Star!’ which we performed for our parents in early December. We did a fantastic job and everyone was so proud of us! Here’s a sneak peek of some of the pictures from our dress rehearsal. More to follow on our next blog post! Thanks for reading!

 

 

 

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December 13 2018

First Class – Ms McManus

 

During the month of November, we spent a lot of time learning about space. The whole class showed such a big interest in space and had such amazing knowledge on the topic, that we even created a space table! Every morning, we would spend a few minutes discussing any new objects or creations that were brought in and placed on the table. We loved to spend any free time we had picking up some new knowledge from the amazing things people brought in.

Our Space Table

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A really important person we learnt about during the month was Neil Armstrong, who was the first man on the moon. Did you know that Armstrong was just 15 years old when he got his first pilots license? He was also part of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, for many years. To help us remember these facts and to help us understand his life better, we created these ‘Neil Armstrong Timelines’

Neil Armstrong

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Before we started working on the topic of space, we wanted to show how much we already knew! We created a KWL in our copies, and a lot of us wanted to learn more about the planets. We started our lesson by creating large pictures of what we thought all of the planets might look like, and what order they might be in. Having discussed everyone’s different ideas, we learnt a rhyme to help us remember the order of the eight planets:


 

 

 

 

 

 

My Very Elderly Mother Just Served Us Noodles

Once we had learnt a little more about the planets, we created these space pictures! Can you believe we put black paint over our beautiful colouring? It was a little scary but we think it paid off!

Our Space Pictures
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December 9 2018

News from Ms. Woods’s Junior Infants

October was a scary month in Ms Woods Junior Infants class. The children opened their own fancy dress clothes shop and there were witches, ghouls and wizards everywhere. They were even writing their own spells in a spell book.

Some witches were hanging around the corridor outside our door.

We had witchy stories and poems and we were learning lots of new words from Oiche Shamhna in Bua na Cainte. We were learning lots of new things while having a great time.

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December 4 2018

Junior Infants – Ms Walsh

Hi Everyone,

 

We have been very busy and having fun here in Junior Infants, even though we are missing Ms Walsh.

 

We have been working hard at our Nativity play and we are learning all our songs for that:)

 

Here we are making or Christmas trees and wreaths, you will see them outside our door when you are coming in to school.

We are also hard at work playing with lego and playdough.

In SPHE we have been learning all about different tastes, like sweet, sour and salty and deciding we we like, and which we don’t like.

 

 

We have been doing some relaxation with the book Listen to the Sky which we all really enjoy and feel very relaxed afterwards.

 

Listen to the Sky Relaxation

 

Thanks for reading this and see you at our play – We can’t wait!

Category: Junior Infants, Art, Music, Drama, S.P.H.E | Comments Off on Junior Infants – Ms Walsh
November 21 2018

News from Ms. Rigby’s First Class!

We’ve had another great few weeks in Room 3. We have been so amazing that we even won a hot chocolate party!
We’ve been busy with our new playground idea called circle of friends. Circle of friends is a circle of children from our class who have a corner of the yard for themselves where they can play with blocks, chalk and a ball. We are encouraged to use positive hands and kind words when playing. This is the only rule to being part of the circle. We have really enjoyed this and have found that we are mixing really well and making new friends. The circle has become bigger each week. We really think that we are playing much more kindly because of the circle and we hope the benefits of it will last a long time. We then made a friendship recipe as part of SPHE to remember what makes a great friend.
We also went to space recently and wrote postcards home. This was a really fun activity. Some of us really used our imagination and it was very believable that our postcards were actually from space.
The Sam Maguire came to visit us last week. We were all so excited. Maybe someday we will have the opportunity to win it. We just haven’t decided if that will be playing for Mayo or Dublin yet!
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November 21 2018

News from Mr. Dunne’s Third Class!

We have been so busy since the last time you heard from us! Last week, we went to the National Heritage Centre in County Wexford. Down there we got a really interesting tour through different settlements throughout Irish history, including Viking settlements which we have been learning about. We got to see how these people used to live, and even how they used to cook! We got to eat meat cooked from a fulacht fiadh – and see how the meat was cooked also. The fulacht fiadh works by placing roasting hot rocks into a bath of water built into the ground. It was a great trip enjoyed by all!

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November 18 2018

News from Ms. Black’s Junior Infants!

We had lots of practice at shopping and dressing up in our Fancy Dress Costume Shop. The cake sale was great fun and we looked fabulous in our Halloween costumes.
We are learning our Jolly Phonics letters and sounding out words. We are working on recognising  the tricky words too. We are practicing our caterpillar letters c o a d g.
  
Our topic for November is food we have enjoyed stories  like Pizza at Sallys, The Tiger Who Came To Tea and Frogie  Eats Out! We have a pizza restaurant in our role play corner. We have done art activities on pizzas and made pasta necklaces. Next week we will continue our food topic with a cafe and ice cream parlour .We are looking forward to cooking pizzas at the end of our food topic.
  
We are writing our numbers and playing maths games  and  doing lots of counting. We have started practising for our Christmas Show and we are having great fun learning the songs and  dancing!
  
Last week we were  on the stage at assembly and sang a song and recited two poems.
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November 18 2018

School Tours in Ms. Kett’s Sixth Class!

Another busy month in 6th class – we can’t actually believe how quickly time is flying by.

The highlight of the last few weeks has to have been watching the girl’s team battle courageously and determinedly in Croke Park and our school tour to Henrietta Street and The Hugh Lane gallery.

We are so proud of the girl’s team and we really respect them for getting out there, staying active, giving their all and representing us and St.Anne’s in such a positive way. Team sports are such a brilliant way of staying fit and healthy but also, committing to a team teaches us to work together, respect and support each other and handle life’s ups and downs and highs and lows in a way that we can’t be simply told about or taught in a classroom. It is invaluable experience that teaches us resilience and important life lessons.

Our tour to Henrietta Street was another day of learning and fun. We arrived at the building in the heart of Dublin city and immediately upon entering, were transported to another time and place. We had really interesting guides who explained to us the history of the building and gave us a good understanding of the lives of the families who lived and sometimes sadly died there. We learned about the different stages in it’s history, which reflected the history of Dublin through the years. It’s journey from a prosperous and flambouyant townhouse during the Georgian Era in Dublin to the slums and tenaments of Dublin’s darkest days, to an example of a family’s home during the 1930s until its last occupants left in the late 1970s. It was a facinating and nostalgic tour that opened our eyes to life in our city in the past. We would highly recommend it to everyone – young and old.

   

We had a fantastic last day before mid-term with dress up and cake eating fun and we are looking forward to the run in to christmas now 🙂

                       

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November 11 2018

3…2…1…BLAST OFF!

During the month of October we learned all about Space! In English we read the story ‘Whatever Next!’ by Jill Murphy. In this story, Baby Bear finds a space rocket in the cupboard under the stairs. He finds a space helmet and space boots in the kitchen and then he zooms up the chimney and lands on the moon, all before bedtime! Whilst reading this story, we practised our comprehension skills of predicting, visualising, questioning and summarising, we learned new vocabulary, wrote a list of things that Baby Bear would need to bring with him to have a picnic and even dramatized Baby Bear zooming up the chimney in his box rocket!

In Maths, we continued to partition and combine for 6 but we also learned all about 2D shapes – squares, rectangles, triangles, circles, ovals and hexagons. We enjoyed going on 2D shape hunts around the school, playing guessing games with the shapes, drawing pictures using 2D shapes, playing with tangrams, using BeeBots to find 2D shapes and constructing 2D shapes out of cocktail sticks and marshmallows. In Gaeilge we learned lots of songs and phrases surrounding the theme of ‘An Scoil’ and of course ‘Oíche Shamhna’.

  

In History, we learned all about Neil Armstrong and created a timeline of his life. In Geography we learned all about our Solar System. We came up with a great mnemonic to remember the names and order of the planets – My Very Excited Mother Just Served Us Noodles – Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. We even pretended to be the planets orbiting around the sun! In Science we learned all about rockets and how they blast off into space. We made our own balloon rockets and launched them along a string.

In Music we learned lots of songs for Halloween but we also had to prepare for our assembly performance. We learned a song that retold the story of ‘Whatever Next!’ that we had been learning in English. We performed it at assembly to all of Junior Infants, Senior Infants and First Class! We did a fantastic job! In Drama, we played some fun drama games and read the story ‘The Way Back Home’ by Oliver Jeffers. The little boy in the story crash lands on the moon and befriends a Martian. Together we had to come up with a solution to help the boy and the Martian find their way back home! This month, we are busy preparing for our Christmas play, we are very excited to perform it in front of all our families.

In Art, we made some fantastic space rockets made out of plastic bottles and papier mâché. We also made some puffy paint planets. We had great fun making the puffy paint out of shaving foam, PVA glue and paint! Finally to talk about our favourite time of the day… Aistear! We loved playing in our space centre role play corner this month. We had to do all our safety checks before counting down and blasting off into space. We then had to put on our space suits and walk around the moon! We hope you enjoyed reading our blog post. Check back in a month’s time to find out what we have been up to in November and follow us on twitter @MsOlsonsClass to keep track in the mean time!

  

   

Category: Senior Infants, Literacy, Maths, Aistear, S.E.S.E, Art, Music | Comments Off on 3…2…1…BLAST OFF!
November 11 2018

Mr Hackett’s Second Class

Welcome to Mr Hacketts Second class. Last term our theme was Autumn and our Locality. We have been busy Maths bees using all our new Maths equipment to help us visualise our maths sums and problem solve. We’ve had loads of fun and learned lots.

We have also been learning and gathering lots about Autumn as we see the signs all around us. The children have made a nature table with leaves , berries, nuts and conkers. Our art work has focused around this and we have done leaf rubbings and chalk/pastel pictures to capture the wonderful colours of Autumn.

In science we have been examining the effects of gravity and we carried out some tests making our own helicopters. We were even able to use sycamore seeds to see the original helicopter at work. The end of term was very exciting and spooky. Check out some of our Halloween decorations and costumes.

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