We had a busy month in October as we explored two themes – Space and Halloween! In English we enjoyed reading our class novel ‘Flat Stanley in Space’ and learning some comprehension strategies including predicting and visualising to help us understand the story better. We were able to use these strategies later on in the month to help us to comprehend our class reader ‘The Witch’s Lair’. We continued with our literacy stations and moved onto guided work with our explanatory genre writing and worked together to write about the lifecycle of a pumpkin. We also explored narrative genre writing as we wrote Halloween stories for a competition. We had a winner for the story competition and another for the bake off competition on our dress up / cake sale day before the Halloween break! Here is our ring finder too from our barm brack!

In Gaeilge we enjoyed learning songs and phrases based on the theme ‘An Fomhár’ (Autumn) and ‘Oíche Shamhna’ (Halloween). We enjoy playing games to learn vocabulary and chatting with our partners as Gaeilge to develop our conversational skills.

In Maths we continued with our two warm up activities – table champs and daily challenge which we love playing and we started some new numbers concepts including addition, estimating, rounding, greater than, less than, equal to and subtraction. We continued learning about 2D shapes and starting learning about 3D shapes. We enjoyed playing games with playing cards and using concrete materials to learn about these topics. We also loved playing loop cards which test our addition and subtraction knowledge. We enjoy going to the maths table to work with the teacher on our Busy at Maths if we need some help or for just a quieter learning space. After we have finished we like taking an activity from the maths table such as geoboards, tangrams, addition and subtraction peg boards or 2D shapes for creating shape pictures.

In S.E.S.E we loved learning all about the different planets of the solar system and about the work of astronauts. We enjoyed watching videos of some astronauts in the International Space Station, learning how they sleep, move around and even how they use the toilet!! We created beautiful planet pictures in art using sponge printing and did some fun rocket experiments! We also learnt about Halloween and its origins as well as Halloween traditions around the world. Ms. Kelly organised a fantastic Halloween trail around the school for us too. We loved collecting items for our Autumn nature table and exploring all the different things using magnifying glasses as an early finisher activity.

In Art we made some really cool Halloween lanterns using a glass jar and crepe paper and patterned pumpkins. We also had to create our design for our Christmas cards fundraiser.

In Music we learnt the song ‘One Way or Another’ from Hocus Pocus 2. We also developed our skills of pitch, structure, duration, rhythm and timbre by singing ‘Bingo’ and ‘Skeleton Stomp’. We explored what sounds we could make using our bodies and our voices and made a rainstorm composition.

In S.P.H.E., we learnt that everyone is special and although we all have similarities, we also have many differences which show our uniqueness. In Religion, we continued our First Holy Communion preparation by learning about The Rosary and how Jesus healed people.

In P.E. we continued on our lessons with Coach Ed and we were delighted to start back with Coach Deirdre for gymnastics.

We hope you enjoyed our blog, tune in soon to find out how we got on in November!