Welcome back to Ms. Olson’s Junior Infants Class blog! We were so busy in October and had such fun exploring our themes – Space and Halloween!

In Aistear, we loved launching our rocket into Space in the home corner. The mission control manager would complete our take off checklist and then we would countdown from 10 and shout ‘BLAST OFF’ as our rocket hurtled into Space. We loved shaking the rocket and banging the tin foil to replicate a noisy rocket! Once we had landed on the moon, it was time for the astronauts to put on their space suits, helmets and jetpacks and see what they could find! We also enjoyed our other Aistear stations – we made solar system jigsaws, made playdough aliens and astronauts, sequenced our nursery rhymes and played with rockets and astronauts at the moon sand tuff tray station! We were very creative when it came to the art station as we made alien spaceships and decorated them with stars and gems!

During the last two weeks of October, we had so much fun in the Halloween Fancy Dress Shop. The shop assistants had to answer the phone and help the customers find a good costume. The customers tried on the costumes in the fitting room and paid for them at the till. Sometimes they had to return their costume so they had to make sure they kept the receipt! We enjoyed playing small world too as we set up all the houses in the town and played trick or treating! We did some nice creative activities too including sequencing ‘The Life Cycle of a Pumpkin’, making Halloween ‘CVC’ words and designing a Halloween costume.

In English, we continued to learn our Jolly Phonics and we started to learn some tricky words! We love singing along to the Tricky Words Songs on YouTube. We also enjoy playing our Jolly Phonics matching games and finding the sounds and tricky words that our teacher hides around the classroom. We are getting very good at blending little words too and we use our ‘tap and stroke’ method to do this. We tap out the sounds on our hand and stroke them together to blend! We are continuing to practise our fine motor skills each day and we are enjoying learning how to write the letters with our sand, whiteboards, playdough and rainbow letters stations. We are also getting very proficient at writing our names! This month we read and explored the stories – ‘Whatever Next!’ by Jill Murphy and ‘Room on the Broom’ by Julia Donaldson.

In Gaeilge, we explored the theme ‘An Scoil’ (School) and ‘Oíche Shamhna’ (Halloween). We love singing the songs, listening to the stories and conversations and playing the games on our interactive programme – Bua na Cainte.

In Maths, we have been doing lots of work on our counting and practising the concept before and after. This month, we were learning how to sort objects, make patterns and make sets of objects and identify which sets had more / fewer or the same number of objects. We also continued to develop our one-to-one correspondence by matching numbers to the correct set of objects and enjoyed playing the button game, animal hunt and snail trail to practise this skill. We continued to practise our number formation and learnt about the 2D shapes. We had great fun programming our little robot, BeeBot, to go to our selected 2D shape. We also ran a ‘Have you got Maths Eyes?’ competition in our class and had lots of amazing entries. Thanks to all of the children and their parents for working so hard on these and congratulations to our winners!

In S.E.S.E, we learnt about our solar system and the names of all of the planets. We explored the life of Neil Armstrong and watched cool videos of the moon landing in 1969 as well as current videos of life in space as an astronaut. We did some rocket experiments too – we used a balloon, a straw, some sellotape and a piece of string to explore how the force of air can propel the rocket along the string and we used a fizzy vitamin tablet to create a film canister rocket. You can watch the videos of our experiments on our Twitter page – @MsOlsonsClass. We had a special visitor in to talk to us too – a big thank you to nurse Siobhán for answering all of our questions. In the second part of the month, we learnt about the story of Halloween and its traditions. We worked as a team to create a skeleton and we tasted some Barm Brack and one lucky person found the ring and got to make a wish! We also learnt about pumpkins and the life cycle of a pumpkin. We even had a few pumpkins in our class!

We did lots of Art this month. We made autumn trees using broccoli to print the leaves, alien spaceships, rocket ships, silly pumpkins, wicked witches and flying ghosts! We also made lovely Halloween bookmarks for a competition. Take a look at all of our lovely artwork!

In Music, we enjoyed learning nursery rhymes and songs. We particularly liked ‘Zoom Zoom Zoom – We’re Going to the Moon’ on YouTube. We also learned plenty of spooky Halloween songs about witches! We did a little Halloween concert for assembly and you can see the videos on our Twitter page. In P.E., we’ve had lots of fun with Coach Steve practising our ball skills and with Deirdre during gymnastics.

On our last day before the midterm break, we had a brilliant day in our fancy dress costumes! We went to the cake sale and bought lots of tasty cakes. We also watched the film, ‘Room on the Broom’. What a month in Junior Infants, we hope you enjoyed reading our blog!