A Winter Wonderland in Senior Infants!

Happy New Year from all of us here in Ms. Olson’s Senior Infants. We can’t believe it is 2019 and we are into our fifth month of school! Time flies when you’re having fun!

In December we explored the theme of Christmas and Wintertime and we really enjoyed ourselves! In Aistear, we loved playing in the Post Office / Santa’s workshop. We had to write letters to Santa, post them in the post box and wait for the elves to design, make and wrap our presents before Santa delivered them to us! At another station we baked chocolate chip cookies for Santa (although we may or may not have eaten them ourselves hehe…)

In Literacy, we read the stories ‘Bear Snores On’ by Karma Wilson and ‘One Snowy Night’ by Nick Buttersworth. Both stories were set in wintertime and the main characters were animals. We also spent some time learning how to write letters. We even drafted our own letters to Santa Claus before copying out the finished piece on to a lovely Santa letter template. Our handwriting was so neat that Ms. Olson displayed them on our classroom wall! In Gaeilge, we learned lots of phrases and new vocabulary surrounding the theme of ‘An Nollaig’. We learnt the songs ‘Bualadh Bos’ and ‘Seo í an Leanbh Íosa’ which are versions of Jingle Bells and Away in a Manger. In Maths we learned about 3D shapes – cube, cuboid, sphere and cylinder. We liked going on shape walks, playing with our 3D Beebot shape mat and making 3D shapes out of marshmallows and cocktail sticks!

In S.E.S.E we learned about the different animals that hibernate and migrate in winter. We also sequenced the story of Christmas and we had great fun learning about materials – in groups we designed toys and we made them out of materials that we could find in the classroom. We then presented our toys to the rest of the class. We also made snow by adding water to polysodium acrylate (the stuff inside nappies!!) in Science!

We made some lovely things in Art last month! We made Christmas elves using our faces, winter penguins, Christmas tree decorations, stain glass nativity scenes and nice Christmas cards for our families. We were very lucky to be able to perform some songs at assembly in Decemeber. We sang an extended version of Jingle Bells and Santa Shark. All the other children loved our performance and even sang along! We also performed our Christmas play ‘What a Star!’ for the school and our parents. We did a fantastic job and Ms. Olson and our parents were so proud of us! We really are superstars in Senior Infants!

Thank you for taking the time to read our blog. We hope you liked it! Our next blog is sure to be an interesting read as we are currently learning about Egypt! Check it out next month – in the meantime keep track of what we are doing by following us on twitter – @MsOlsonsClass!

Category: Senior Infants, Literacy, Maths, Aistear, S.E.S.E, Art | Comments Off

January 14 2019

First Class – Ms McManus

After a really lovely break, we’ve started to settle down in first class after a crazy and fun lead up to Christmas! One of the first things we did as a class, was discuss New Year’s Resolutions. We brainstormed some ideas that we knew we could stick to for the whole year, and everyone chose one to write up as a reminder. We’ll let you know how they’re going throughout the year!

Just before the break, we learned all about Christopher Columbus and his explorations. We learned about his life as a trader and chatted about how difficult life would have been as an explorer, before the invention of airplanes! Once we felt we knew enough about Columbus, we created fact files so that other people in our class could come and learn about him too!

Our first art lesson of the year focused on a printing technique called ‘pointilism’. We used cotton buds to fill outlines of our favourite toys with colour. It took a long time and the boys and girls had to be very patient, but I think the hard work paid off!

Pointilism Examples:

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January 10 2019

Junior Infants – Room 9

Hello and Happy New Year Everyone,

We are all delighted to be back after Christmas, we have only been back for a week and at the moment we are learning about the South Pole.

The South Pole

We are learning about animals, the weather, and transport that you would use in the South Pole. Our play area is set up for camping in the South Pole and we have played at cooking food. We have binoculars, toy penguins and maps to enhance our learning experience. We have made penguins in Art which are displayed outside our room – come and check them out:)

Maths

We have been learning about different shapes. We’ve been making sets and working out which set each shape belongs in.

Poems

We have also been learning a poem called The Penguin.

That’s all from Junior Infants – hope you all had a great Christmas and loved our play, as much as we loved doing it. Bye for now.

Category: Junior Infants, Literacy, Maths, Aistear, Art | Comments Off

January 10 2019

Paleontologists at work in Ms Hughes’ Class

Lots of exciting things have happened in Senior Infants since our last post. We had an exciting November. Science Week inspired our theme ‘Dinosaurs’. We worked as scientists excavating fossils from our Paleontology sand pit dig. We used our chisels and brushes to uncover fossils and then we recorded our findings on our clip board chart- serious business!

We made our own salt dough ‘fossils’ by imprinting shells and toy dinosaurs into the dough. In art we created dinosaurs bone pictures. Deva also built us an amazing Volcano so we could really go back to a prehistoric world during role play time. We have learnt the different names and characteristics of lots of dinosaurs and we have even done ‘The Dino Stomp’ dance

We really enjoyed our dance classes with Ms Casey and we also wowed the parents and teachers in our performance of ‘A Christmas Toy Story’. We are a talented bunch and can’t wait to see what learning and fun term two brings.

Category: Senior Infants, Aistear, S.E.S.E, Art, Drama | Comments Off

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!

Category: Senior Infants, Aistear, S.E.S.E, Art, Drama | Comments Off

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.

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

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.

Category: Junior Infants, Numeracy, Aistear, Art | Comments Off

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

November 8 2018

1st Class News – November 2018 – Ms McManus

We are back in first class after a wonderful midterm, we hope everyone enjoyed a well-deserved break! We were kept busy in the weeks leading up to our week off with lots of Halloween activities and new topics to learn about.

One of our favourite weeks last month was ‘Maths Week’! Throughout the week, we focused on problem solving and using our maths eyes. Every day, we would use our problem solving skills to solve some tricky maths riddles. For example: Stephen, Liam, Carla and Sadhbh meet up. Each person shakes hands with every other person once. How many handshakes are there in total? As well as solving riddles, our class became mindful of all the wonderful mathematical shapes, lines and problems hidden around us in our everyday lives. We used pictures of lots of everyday items to create and solve mathematical problems, for example: Can you estimate how many smarties are on these gingerbread men? Some people in the class even used their maths eyes at home, and brought in pictures that we stuck on our maths wall!

Throughout October, we also focused on learning a little bit more about where Halloween comes from. We discovered that Halloween actually originated in Ireland and comes from a festival called Samhain, which was celebrated by the Celts. As some of the children in the class would be in different countries for the Halloween break, we decided to learn a bit about Halloween traditions around the world. We looked at different ways the festival is celebrated in China, Belgium, Canada, England, Spain and Mexico. Did you know that in Hong Kong, Halloween is known as the ‘Festival of Hungry Ghosts? Some people even burn pictures of money or fruit on this day, as they believe the images may reach the spirit world and bring comfort to the ghosts!

In art, we wanted to put our knowledge of Autumn to good use. We created these autumn scenes, using paint and cotton balls. We made sure to include all the usual colours we see in Autumn, and even added some falling leaves!

Category: First Class, Maths, Geography, Art | Comments Off

November 4 2018

Mischief Managed in Ms. Kett’s Class!

We have gone Harry Potter mad in Ms. Kett’s 6^th class and we’re currently starting the 2^nd book in the series. Although some of us have read them before, lots of us haven’t and we’re all thoroughly enjoying reading and disecting them. We are using the novel to inspire our art, teach us about story and character development and of course how to improve our own writing by using rich and descriptive language and a variety of adjectives and adverbs, a speciality of J.K. Rowlings.

As 6^th class is our last year in primary school we began the year by writing a letter to our teacher with some requests and hopes for the year ahead. We are very excited about confirmation preparation and of course getting ready for the big move to secondary school. With this in mind we’ve been having lots of conversations around SPHE topics such as – friendships, looking after ourselves and making good choices. We’ve also been discussing healthy eating and good habits and began our studies of the human body by looking at the heart and lungs. The brain is next – we can’t wait. In history we are currently learning all about the Georgian Era and looking at architectural evidence round our great city. We are drawing and constructing Georgian building and doors and are becoming increasingly impressed by the magnificient buildings from the past. We are going on our first tour next week to Henrietta Street museum and the Hugh Lane Gallery. We are excited and looking forward to many more educational (and fun) tours throughout the year.

This month we also produced a ‘Passion Project’. We researched and prepared these at home and presented them to the class on completion. The variety and standard of the projects was excellent and it was facinating to learn about each others passions in such detail. We learned a lot from each other; some baked brownies and cookies (very popular indeed) and explained the process, others chose football as their passion (surprise, surprise), other projects included the World of Disney, Harry Potter, Horses, Hockey, Parties and even The Immune System, to name but a few. They were all fantastic and very informative. We are looking forward to doing many more projects throughout the year ahead.

We’ve also been keeping our eyes peeled for signs of Autumn and in particular the amazing changing colours in our environment. We’ve learned about photosynthesis and the Season s at a global level. The wonderful autumnal colours have inspired more art.

Overall we’ve had a great start to the year and are looking forward to Halloween and the mid-term break now but also learning much more as the year unfolds. Slán.

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