June 5 2019

April News from Ms. Olson’s Class!

Our theme for the month of April was ‘The Weather’. We had great fun during Aistear time playing in the weather station. We had to pretend that we were on the television giving the weather forecast whilst the rest of the group watched us from the couch! It was lots of fun!

In English we kept a weather diary. Each day we wrote about the weather. Unsurprisingly it rained for most of the week! It is Ireland after all!! We also did some explanatory writing and learned about the water cycle! We continued on with our Literacy Lift Off programme too, we have all progressed so well in our reading since beginning this programme! As well as reading, we’ve been working on our rhyming words and word families, we like doing our PAT workbook where we write down all our rhyming words. We were also very lucky to have an author come in to speak to us about the book he had written in aid of Temple Street Hospital – The Return of the Dragon by Don Briggs and illustrated by Naomi Peppard. He read us the story and Naomi showed us how she drew and painted the pictures. We were able to buy a copy of the book and all the profits go to Temple Street Hospital. The book has already raised €3o,000!

   

   

In Maths this month, we learnt about length. We did lots of activities including making worms out of play dough and comparing the lengths with other children in our class; sorting different objects according to length, length hunts in the classroom; measuring the length of the corridor, classroom, table and hall using the Easter Bunny’s footprints; making different length pasta necklaces and measuring how far we could throw beanbags! We love Maths because we are always learning in an active way!

   

   

In Gaeilge we learnt songs and phrases related to ‘An Aimsir’ (The Weather) and ‘An Cháisc’ (Easter). In S.E.S.E we investigated static electricity by doing some cool experiments with balloons. We also explored the work of meteorologists, day and night, the different types of weather and the effect that the weather has on people e.g. on their clothes. We looked at colours and realised that there are many different colours some of which are light and some are dark. We loved investigating shadows. We drew around our shadows in the yard and then revisited them later to see whether they had moved. Unfortunately it took us a few days to do this as we had to wait for some sun!! We also did some weather experiments, we made the water cycle in a glass, raining clouds and we tested different materials and coats to see which were waterproof!

    

   

In Music we learnt some lovely songs including ‘Marvellous Things’; ‘Hokey Pokey’ and ‘Mo Ghairdín’ and in Art we made hatching chick pictures, Easter cards using potato prints and rainbow mobiles. To reward our good behaviour we had a eggcellent easter egg hunt on our last day of term before our Easter holidays! It was so much fun!

   

   

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April 16 2019

March News from Ms. Olson’s Class

What a busy month March was in Senior Infants! We learned about homes this month. In Aistear we enjoyed playing in our home corner, doing different cut and stick activities and playing small world.

As it was book week in early March, we had a very special treat. Mr Fingleton came into our class to read one of our big books of the month – The Pig in the Pond, written by Martin Waddell. We thought this book was absolutely hilarious. We also read ‘A Squash and a Squeeze’ by Julia Donaldson and Ms. Olson began reading ‘The Twits’ by Roald Dahl to us at lunch times. During book week, Sixth Class very kindly came to read us our favourite books and we got to dress up as our favourite character on World Book Day. It was a very difficult decision for the judges of the dress-up competition to make but the well-deserving winner was the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland. We even had a bookmark and character design drawing competition and we had some well deserving winners of that too!

       

In Maths, we learnt all about money and we had great fun playing different money games including our coin exchange game. We can now exchange coins up to 10c and we can ‘pay’ for things in our pretend shop up to 20c! In Gaeilge we continued our lessons on ‘Sa Bhaile’ (Home) and we loved doing the topic – Lá le Pádraig (St. Patrick’s Day). In S.E.S.E we learnt about the different types of homes that people live in and we made a bar chart depicting what type of homes the children in our class live in. We learnt about the rooms in our homes and what activities might occur in these rooms, e.g. cooking in the kitchen! We also learnt about electricity and what appliances use electricity in the home and we went on a Spring walk and found some newts in our school pond!

In Music, we learnt some nice songs surrounding our theme – ‘Gotta Build a House’ and ‘The Wise Man and the Foolish Man’.  We also learnt some songs as Gaeilge and performed them with the rest of Senior Infants for our St. Patrick’s Day Concert.

In Art we made our dream homes out of cardboard cereal boxes. You can have a look at a video of our houses on our Twitter – @MsOlsonsClass. Finally, we were so lucky this month as we got to go to the new science activity centre – Explorium! We had so much fun climbing, playing in the supermarket, dressing up, building things and trying out all the cool experiments. We’ll definitely be back!

        

            

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April 16 2019

February News from Ms. Olson’s Class!

In February we learnt all about animals. We had great fun playing in our Veterinary Surgery role play corner during Aistear time. In English, we read the story, Farmer Duck, written by Martin Waddell and we practised our summarising and sequencing skills. We loved reading this story as it was very funny!

In Maths, we learnt about weight. We had lots of fun sorting different objects according to weight and playing and measuring with balances. We even got to bake some tasty buns!

   

   

In Gaeilge we learnt lots of phrases and songs relating to the themes of  Éadaí  (Clothes) and ‘Sa Bhaile’ (Home). In S.E.S.E we learnt about farmers and vets, animals and their young and how to care for our pets. We also did some report writing on ‘Our Pets’.

In Drama, we read the story ‘Cleopatra Silverwing’ by Adria Meserve. This story follows the life of a beautiful butterfly who loves doing cherry dip flips and loop-the-loops! One day she decides to go on an adventure instead of doing what she’s told – a storm is brewing and she is told it’s time to head home. We pretended to be Cleopatra doing her stunts and we came up with solutions to her problems that she faced on her adventure. In Music, we sang some lovely songs related to our animal theme – ‘Who Built the Ark?’ and ‘Please Mr. Noah’. In Art we made some cute little piggies out of cardboard tubes to celebrate Chinese New Year and we made animals out of clay!

   

Finally in P.E we learnt a dance to the Lion King’s ‘I just can’t wait to be King’. We did dance lessons with Ms. Casey for six weeks and at the end, we performed this dance for all the children at Junior Assembly. You can check out our dance on Twitter @MsOlsonsClass.

 

Category: Senior Infants, Literacy, Maths, Gaeilge, Aistear, S.E.S.E, Art, Music, Drama, Physical Education | Comments Off on February News from Ms. Olson’s Class!
April 12 2019

Hard at Work in Ms. Woods’ Class!

Time is marching on and it is hard to believe that we have only one short term left in Junior Infants. Everyone has been hard at work in Room 1.

We are busy reading new books every day and have started to write our own sentences. We had a great time dressing up as our favourite book character. Some of the older children came down and read us our favourite book.
  
Our doctor’s surgery, vet clinic and farm have kept us busy  in our play corner during aistear.
The signs of spring were evident when we went on a nature walk to see the newts in the pond and we all made our spring display. We have been learning about the lifecycle of the frog and the chick as well as animals and their young.
  
We all dressed up in green to celebrate St Patrick’s Day and we spoke in Irish and sang Irish songs to celebrate seachtain na gaeilge. We made cards to thank our Mums for being so great and to celebrate Mother’s Day.
We are doing lots of number stories and are as usual working hard while having fun.
   
   
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April 3 2019

News from Ms Livingston’s Class

Welcome to Ms. Livingston’s Senior Infants. This month, our Aistear theme was People who help us. We learned all about people in our community such as firefighters, doctors, nurses, dentists, lollipop ladies, paramedics, lifeguards and more! We performed two poems at junior assembly, one about how firemen help us and another about the gardaí.

We all dressed up in our Irish colours for St. Patrick’s Day! We looked at the St. Patrick’s Day parade and also how other countries celebrate it around the world.

We went on a Spring nature walk around the school grounds. We recorded any signs of spring. We found a lot of daffodils. We also saw lots of different flowers which some classes had planted in Senior Yard. We used our five senses while on our walk. We could smell lavender from the school garden. We also could hear birds chirping.

We also planted our very own seeds from the Incredible edible programme. We first planted the seeds in small containers in our class. Some of the food we planted were turnips, lettuce, carrots, potatoes, strawberries, and chives. When they started to sprout in the pots, we moved them and planted them in the garden. We hope to see them grow even more!

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March 14 2019

News from Ms. Black’s Junior Infants!

This month we learned about Polar bears and other arctic animals, we did very cool artwork.
  
We were learning all about the weather and we kept a weather journal for a week to record the different types of weather each day. We learned lots about aimsir in gaeilge. We made great symbols of sunshine, cloud, rain, snow and wind for our weather forecast corner. We took turns to forecast the weather all over Ireland.
In maths we are learning the story of 5 and we did a survey on eye colour in our class and showed the results on a pictogram.
Daily reading has started and we are really excited to read a different book everyday.
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March 14 2019

News from Ms. Woods’ Junior Infants!

This month we went to the polar regions with our Aistear.

We made penguins and polar bears and had great fun finding out about Tom Crean and all his adventures in Antartica.

  

We set up camp and went fishing in the arctic and followed Tom Crean’s example and went to explore the South pole. We looked at the emperor penguin and were amazed to see that the male penguin minds the eggs.

  

We spent a lot of time learning our jolly phonics sounds and are now able to blend them to form words. We are learning the story of five in Maths.We sang, did poetry and lots of irish.We had a great time!
 
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March 11 2019

Back to School with a Bang in Senior Infants!

January was an interesting month in Senior Infants because we learnt all about Egypt! We had lots of fun during Aistear time. We enjoyed playing in the Airport Role Play corner where we pretended to be going on our holidays to Egypt. We liked building pyramids out of Lego. We pretended to be archaeologists digging for buried treasure during sand play and we worked as a team to create cool mummies and sarcophaguses.

 

In English, we spent a lot of time on narrative writing as we entered the Write a Book Project. Our book was about a little boy and a little girl called John and Jojo. They went on a school tour to an Egyptian museum and managed to travel back in time to have a scary encounter with a mummy! It all turned out ok in the end though!

In Gaeilge, we learned many songs and phrases around the topics of Bia (food) and Éadaí (Clothes). We loved playing little language games using picture cards in pairs because we were able to talk to our friends using the simple phrases that we’d learnt. In Maths we revised pattern and data. We made lots of different patterns using shapes, camels, pegboards and unifi cubes. We did a survey of our class to investigate what everyone’s favourite toy was and then we recorded the data by making bar charts.

  

  

In S.E.S.E we learnt all about Egypt. We learned about Egypt’s landscape, rivers, mountains and cities. We learnt about Egyptian food and animals that you might find in Egypt such as camels, cheetahs, crocodiles, hyenas and cobras. Then we learnt about Egyptian pharaohs such as Tutankhamun and Cleopatra and about pyramids and mummies. We found it all very fascinating!

In Art, we wrote our names in Egyptian hieroglyphs and we made pharaoh pictures using our photographs. We also made Egyptian golden necklaces using dyed pasta! They all turned out really well!

  

In Music we’ve been learning lots of songs as we always start our day with a song. We particularly enjoyed learning the song ‘Over in the Meadow’ and we loved performing it for our Grandparents on Grandparent’s Day. In Drama, we read the story ‘The Girl with the Red Slippers’ which is an Egyptian version of Cinderella. We had great fun pretending to be ballerinas and acting out the different parts in the story. Finally, we have been doing dance in P.E with Catherine Casey and we learnt a dance from the Lion King. You can check it out on our twitter page – @MsOlsonsClass

Category: Senior Infants, Literacy, Numeracy, Gaeilge, Aistear, S.E.S.E, Art, Drama, Physical Education | Comments Off on Back to School with a Bang in Senior Infants!
January 20 2019

News from Ms. Woods’ Class!

We have had a very busy couple of months in Ms. Woods’ Junior Infant class. Our theme for November was food and we had a pizza parlour and an ice cream shop in our socio-dramatic area in the classroom. We designed our own restaurants with stickle bricks and created pizzas from play dough and paper.

   

We were all delighted to see the Sam Maguire cup when it was brought into the classroom by Steve our GAA coach. UP THE DUBS !!
All our hard work paid off when we were fantastic in our play ‘The First Nativity’. We made angels, Christmas trees, snow scenes, and Christmas wreaths. As usual, we had lots of fun while working hard at our maths. jolly phonics and writing.
   
   
          
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January 20 2019

News from Ms. Black’s Class!

We had a very busy, exciting month in December. We made lots of colourful Christmas decorations. We learned how busy the post office is at Christmas time and we designed our own Christmas cards. We worked hard at learning our lines, songs and dances for our Christmas play. We looked very cute in our costumes and enjoyed performing for our families and the school.
        
        
Back at school now, we have been busy learning about Antarctica. We made cute penguins and learned many interesting facts about emperor penguins.  We heard about Tom Crean the heroic Irish Antarctic explorer and we designed our own boats. We were experimenting with lots of different item to see what floats and sinks. In reading we are practising tricky words and writing three letter words ourselves.
        
                                               
We have dance classes with Ms. Casey on Tuesdays and PE on Wednesdays. Next week we are looking at polar bears and other arctic animals.

 

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