September News from Ms. Olson’s Second Class!

Welcome to our first blog in Ms. Olson’s Second Class! We’ve settled in very well and are enjoying our time in our new classroom. Our theme for September was ‘Myself’ and we learned lots of new things exploring this theme across all of our school subjects.

In English we enjoyed sharing our news about our summer holidays before writing a short recount of where we went, who we saw, what we played and ate and what we did on our last day before starting school. We started our literacy stations where we work in small groups with a teacher learning about phonological awareness, spelling, comprehension strategies, genre writing and grammar. This month we are learning about explanatory genre writing and have worked together on a couple of shared pieces including ‘The Lifecycle of a Human’ and ‘How do we Breathe?’. Explanatory genre writing has tied in very well with our reader this month as we have read and explored two explanatory pieces called ‘Funny Bodies’ and ‘My Little Book of Calm’. We really enjoyed ‘Funny Bodies’ as it explains how our bodies do ‘disgusting’ things like produce snot and vomit!! ‘My Little Book of Calm’ explains how we can practise mindfulness and we’ve enjoyed trying out some of the tips including deep breathing! We love the end of the day just before we go home as our teacher is reading ‘Matilda’ by Roald Dahl to us.

In Gaeilge we have been exploring the theme ‘Mé Féin’ (Myself) and are enjoying learning songs, rhymes and phrases as Gaeilge including the ‘Hócaí Pócaí’ (Hokey Pokey). We are practising reading and writing as Gaeilge and working on our conversational Gaeilge too.

In Maths we revised some First Class content and are now really getting stuck in to Second Class work and loving it! When we were given the option of doing Maths or Art one day – Maths narrowly missed out in the vote! We enjoy starting our lesson with a daily challenge, our teacher writes a word problem on the board and we need to figure out the answer. We use skills like underlining the important information to help us decide what kind of question it is – an addition or a subtraction problem. Afterwards we play a game of tables champs which we adore or we play some counting games before moving on to the lesson content. We use concrete materials and games to help us to grasp the concepts that we’ve been learning about including addition, rounding and estimation. Once the concept has been taught we reinforce our learning with our Busy at Maths book. We also enjoyed starting our mathletics programme on the iPads. We learned about 2D shapes too. We enjoyed playing games such as guess the shape and headbands using shape properties. We went on a shape hunt around the school and we made shapes using lollipop sticks, tangrams and geoboards.

In S.E.S.E. (Geography, History and Science) we learnt about the topic of growing and changing. We identified our needs for growth and investigated how we have changed since we were babies. Our parents very kindly sent in baby pictures of us and some baby artefacts for us to look at in History. We played a fun Kahoot! quiz on the iPads to identify which baby picture belonged to who and we really enjoyed it! We also learnt about our families and identified the members of our families for a family tree. We discussed different roles within the family and wrote a report genre piece on our family in Geography. Finally in Science, we learnt about our body parts and the functions of our organs. We also grew a class plant affectionately know as ‘Larry’ to investigate the process of growing and changing!

In Art we were inspired by Pablo Picasso to create abstract self-portraits. We used pencil to draw our self-portraits before painting them using bright colours and outlining them in black marker to make them pop! We also constructed family trees with cardboard and sticks that we found in the school grounds. We added pictures of our family members and tissue paper to depict leaves. We were delighted with the result and received so many compliments on them from other teachers and pupils!

In Music, we learnt the songs ‘Ireland’s Call’ in response to the rugby world cup and ‘When I Grow Up’ from Matilda the Musical in response to our theme. We are hoping to perform the latter for other pupils at an assembly. We have been engaging with our music programme ‘Dabbledoo’, looking at sounds in our environment and composing different sounds using body percussion. In groups we came up with compositions and designed symbols to accompany each sound. We performed them for the class and watched back a recording of our performance to analyse. In Drama we have been exploring the short film available on Disney + called Float. This film depicts the life of a little boy who can float and his father who hides him away from society because he is different. We really loved this film and engaged in different drama conventions such as still image, hot-seating of a character and conscience alley.

In S.P.H.E, we’ve been exploring the themes of friendships and how to be a good friend. We also identified similarities and differences between people and the uniqueness of each individual. We read a lovely poem called ‘Unique’ and we investigated our fingerprints and identified their pattern – loop, whorl or arch to show that no two fingerprints are the same. In P.E. we are glad to have Coach Ed back with us teaching us lots of ball skills in response to the rugby world cup and we are continuing ball skills with our teacher on our other P.E. day.

Finally in Religion, we have started our prep for our First Holy Communion by learning our prayers and engaging with our Grow in Love programme. We had our first visit to the church in September for our back to school mass and we are looking forward o a tour of the church in the coming weeks. Here are some pictures from golden time on Fridays to finish off our blog.

That’s all for now! We hope you enjoyed reading our blog. Tune in next month to find out what we got up to in October!

Category: Second Class, Literacy, Numeracy, S.E.S.E, Art, Music, Drama, S.P.H.E, Physical Education, Religion | Comments Off

December 22 2021

Merry Christmas from Ms. Olson’s Junior Infants!

What a great month December has been in Junior Infants! We did lots of fun activities surrounding our theme – Christmas, and we were visited by our elf – Rudolph!

In Aistear, we absolutely loved playing in the Post Office / Santa’s Workshop Home Corner. During the first week in December, we wrote our letters to Santa and posted them to the North Pole in our very own postbox. We had to buy stamps from the Post Office first. Afterwards, the Post Person delivered the letters to Santa and his elves. Santa designed the toys in his workshop and the elves made and wrapped the toys. Once checked off by Santa, he packed his sack and delivered the toys to all the children. His reindeer helped him to fly his sleigh! In week two, we focused on sending Christmas cards in the Post Office!

We also enjoyed playing Small World in Aistear. The children set up their town and pretended that the post person was coming to deliver letters and parcels. In week two, we constructed Santa’s Workshop out of stickle bricks and pretended to be Santa and his elves working away making all the presents. We liked our playdough station as well, we made lots of cookies and cakes for Santa! We loved filling our stockings with toys from the Smyth’s Catalogue at our cut and stick station and we worked hard at making our Christmas cards and other art projects. During the last week of school, we had freeplay and enjoyed choosing our own toys to play with!

In English, we continued learning our Jolly Phonics sounds. We are improving everyday at learning our Tricky Words and our blending is coming along so well too. Soon we will be able to read little books! We enjoyed reading lots of Christmas and Winter themed books including ‘Bear Snores On’ by Karma Wilson, ‘One Snowy Night’ by Nick Buttersworth, ‘The Jolly Christmas Postman’ by Allan and Janet Ahlberg and ‘Stickman’ by Julia Donaldson. Our handwriting is really coming along too, we enjoyed writing a short letter to Santa as well as simple sentences in our copy books.

In Gaeilge, we enjoyed learning about ‘Caitheamh Aimsire’ (Hobbies) and ‘Ócáidí Speisialta – An Nollaig’ (Special Occasions – Christmas) using our Bua na Cainte programme. We love singing the songs, playing the games and listening to the stories.

In Maths, we learned about time. We focused on learning the days of the week as well as sequencing stories such as ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ by Eric Carle. We enjoyed playing lots of time challenges and we timed them by counting the number of claps it took to complete the challenge. We compared the times it took to do two different challenges when we played the game, ‘Who Finishes First?’. One child had to do an activity such as building a tower of unifix cubes whilst the other child had to do a physical activity such as jumping jacks. We had to guess who would finish first and then test out our theories! We also learned about the 3D shapes – cube, cuboid, cylinder, sphere, cone and pyramid. We did lots of different activities including shape hunts, the feely bag game, shape sorting, work with the BeeBots and constructing the shapes with playdough and sticks. We also revised our 2D shapes and length and practised our patterns on the iPads by playing a Topmarks Christmas Patterns game!

In S.E.S.E, we learned about the signs of Winter as well as learning all about the story of Christmas. We explored toys too – we compared toys from today and toys from the past, we investigated which toys are pulled and which are pushed and we even designed our own toys in groups before constructing them out of materials found in the classroom. On our last day of school, we made fake snow using poly sodium acrylate – the non-toxic substance found in nappies!

In Music, we learnt lots of lovely songs including ‘Jog Along Little Donkey to Bethlehem’, ‘Féach ar an Máinséar’ and ‘Here Comes Santa Claus’. In S.P.H.E., we learned about our senses and our families. We had lots of fun exploring our sense of touch by feeling different materials with and without a blindfold on! In P.E., we had lots of fun with Coach Gráinne – our favourite lesson being developing skills using balloons! We also did a fun run to raise money for our Student Council.

We also baked real cookies for Santa, but we decided they wouldn’t last until Christmas so we had to eat them ourselves!

As if all of that wasn’t enough, we performed our Christmas play – ‘Our First Nativity’ which we had been working so hard on for several weeks. We recorded it for our parents so that we could sit and watch it together. It was a roaring success! Afterwards, we had a lovely party to celebrate!

Thanks for reading our blog, we hope you enjoyed it. We wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! See you next year!

Category: Junior Infants, Literacy, Numeracy, Aistear, S.E.S.E, Art, Music, Drama, S.P.H.E, Physical Education | Comments Off

October 8 2021

Our First Month of Big School in Ms. Olson’s Class!

Wow! What a month in big school for Ms. Olson’s Junior Infants! We are loving being in school, have settled in so well and made lots of friends. On our first day, we walked into school all by ourselves and had lots of fun playing with the toys with our new classmates. Here are some pictures from our first day of school.

In September, we learnt all about ourselves and the doctor. Every morning we do Aistear, which is structured playtime. There are four stations per week and we play at one station each day. We love playing in the home corner! This month, we enjoyed playing in ‘The Doctors’ Surgery’, ‘The Toys’ Hospital’ and ‘The Opticians’. We were given a role to play and had to act out the part that we were given. We also enjoyed playing in small world. In small world, we had to set up a town and act out different scenarios using wooden people. Some of the scenarios included going to the doctors or calling an ambulance to our home. Another station that we enjoyed doing was playdough. We were given themed playdough mats and had to add playdough details to them. We had to make doctor’s instruments like a stethoscope and we had to add glasses to people’s faces! We usually have a cut and stick station too to practise our cutting skills such as sequencing the nursery rhymes that we are learning. We also made cool glasses when we were learning about the opticians – we coloured them, cut them out and added some nice stickers to them! Sometimes we have a construction station. We made hospitals out of Lego and Duplo this month. On Fridays, we have freeplay. This means we can play with any of the toys in the classroom. We just love playtime in Junior Infants!

In English, we started learning our Jolly Phonics! We love listening and singing along to the Jolly Songs as well as listening to the sound story and answering questions about it. Sometimes our teacher hides the sounds around the classroom and we have to find them and think of some words that contain that sound. We also love playing ‘I Spy’ when we are learning our sounds. We have started to learn how to write these sounds too. We learn the formation through different stations including writing the sounds in sand, using playdough to make the sounds, doing rainbow letters and covering the sound with counters! When we finished the first group of Jolly Phonics, we started blending little words and learning our Tricky Words! We love the Tricky Words songs on YouTube. We are also doing lots of activities to develop our fine motor skills. Building up our hand muscles will make us excellent writers! We do fun activities each day such as cutting, writing our names, threading beads, playing with polydrons, pegboards, links, connecting cubes, straws, chopsticks, popping bubble wrap, jigsaws and playdough. We also love story time at the end of the day, some of the stories we read were, ‘The Gruffalo’, ‘The Gruffalo’s Child’, ‘Owl Babies’, ‘The Berenstain Bears go to the Doctor’, ‘Froggy goes to the Doctor’ and ‘The President’s Glasses’.

We love our interactive Gaeilge programme, Bua na Cainte. We explored the theme ‘Mé Féin’ (Myself) in September. We learn songs as Gaeilge (in Irish) and listen to the conversations. We like learning little phrases that we can say to our friends and our teacher. Sometimes we play with little picture cards and ask our partners some questions as Gaeilge. We also love the games on Bua na Cainte as they develop our listening skills! We also like when we get a visit from our dog puppet ‘Rolaí Polaí’ who only understands Gaeilge!

In Maths, we have been doing lots of counting games and we learnt how to sort objects into sets according to colour, shape, size, number and type of object. We learnt how to make patterns with two colours (ABAB) and we’ve been learning how to write some of our numbers. We enjoyed playing maths games including ‘Happy Faces’ and ‘Sweetie Jar’ as they help us to develop one-to-one correspondence! We made sets of two and three items and we learnt the names of the 2D shapes – circle, square, rectangle, triangle, oval and hexagon. We played a fun feely bag game with the shapes and we went on a shape hunt around the school.

In S.E.S.E. (Geography, History and Science), we learnt about our families, our school and our journey to school. We had lots of fun learning about our school as we got to go for a tour of the school and then we worked together to build an aerial view map of it! The green pages represent the yards with trees, the yellow hexagons are the classrooms, jenga blocks are the corridors and the red shapes represent other classrooms and the stage in the hall. We also learnt about the work of a doctor and an optician and we learnt the names of all of our body parts. We made a skeleton as well in groups. We cut out all the bones and stuck them together. They are also coming in handy as our Halloween decorations!

In Music, we were learning lots of lovely nursery rhymes. We particularly like ‘Miss Polly had a Dolly’ and we love doing actions to all of our songs! In Art, we made lots of lovely things including, self portraits, X-ray hands and Owl Babies pictures. We used a print technique with pom poms to create our Owl Babies. In P.E., we have been playing lots of playground games, doing relays, developing our hopping and skipping skills and working on our throwing and catching skills with beanbags. We are very lucky to have Coach Gráinne coming in to us each Wednesday! In S.P.H.E., we have been learning all about being a good friend and using our ‘Kind Hands, Kind Words and Kind Feet’ in school. We learnt that we are all different, special and unique – we investigated our fingerprints and handprints as a way of showing this.

We hope you enjoyed our blog, we know it was quite long but we did so much in September and we wanted to tell you all about it! Tune in next month to hear about what we got up to in October!

Category: Junior Infants, Literacy, Numeracy, Aistear, S.E.S.E, Art, Drama, S.P.H.E, Physical Education | Comments Off

June 9 2021

Eggcellent May News from Ms. Olson’s Class!

We had a very eggciting month in May as our baby chicks were born! We incubated ten chicken eggs for twenty one days and they hatched into ten fluffy chicks called Toast, Big Foot, Eggbert, Pickle, Sunny, Sunshine, Lucky, Snowy, Egg and Potato! Our eggs were incubated at 37.8 degrees celsius inside a manual incubator and we had to ensure there was enough water in the gauge to keep the humidity at the right level. Each day we turned the eggs at least three times and we numbered them on one side and put an ‘x’ on the other to ensure we knew which egg was which! We did all of this to minic what would happen in real life with a hen! Usually a hen sits on the eggs and keeps the eggs at the right temperature as well as turning them several times a day with her feet to ensure that they develop properly. The hen’s feathers are slightly damp underneath which ensures the correct humidity for her eggs too!

After about eight days of incubation we were able to see some veins inside our eggs when we candled them. This involving shining a torch through them in a dark room.

On day fourteen we candled them again to reveal much larger dark shadows that were beginning to move!

We did our final check on day eighteen which showed our chicks having great fun moving around in their little eggs.

For the last three days, we didn’t turn the eggs anymore in order for the chicks to get into the right position for hatching. On day twenty-one our first egg pipped and the rest soon followed. A ‘pip’ is when the chick makes its first crack of the egg with its egg tooth (a little tooth on the top of its beak which breaks off post hatch – specially designed for cracking shells), it does this to give itself more air to breath. Inside the egg, there is an air sac which the chick will breath from before it pips. After the chicks pipped their shells, it took about ten to twelve hours for them to fully hatch. Making the first pip is hard work and they need to have a good rest, absorb the rest of the egg yolk through their belly buttons (their food) and conserve their energy for their big hatch.

The hatch itself doesn’t take too long, maybe an hour at most! The chick has to work its way around the whole shell before using its back, neck, wing and head to push itself out of the shell. Inside the egg, the chick’s head is tucked up underneath its wing to protect it – hence why you might have seen the wing come out of the shell first in our Twitter videos – @MsOlsonsClass.

The chicks did not come out of the shell looking all fluffy! Their feathers were actually soaking wet!

We left them in the incubator until they had dried and fluffed up and then we transported them into a suitable box. We hung an infrared heat lamp over the box to keep them cosy and gave them lots of food and water. A normal lamp wouldn’t work as well as the little chicks would find it too difficult to sleep with the harsh light. The chicks grew so quickly and began to get their wing feathers after only a couple of days.

They could often be seen preening themselves to change the fluff to feathers! After five days our chicks went to a lovely new home with lots of other chicken friends but each class in the school got to visit them before they left and were given a chance to name them!

We were lucky enough to be sent updates too! Look at how much they’ve grown after only a week or two!

Besides all of the chick news, we actually did so many other things in May that we need to tell you about too! In May we were learning all about transport. Each week our Aistear corner changed into a different vehicle! We had lots of fun playing in the bus, train and aeroplane! We constructed different vehicles using a variety of different materials including Lego, Duplo, polydrons and stickle bricks. We enjoyed making a runway for our aeroplanes to land and take off from too. We mapped out journeys in small world using our mats, vehicles and trains to travel around the town and we did some cut and stick activities including labelling a car, sorting vehicles by air, land and sea and creating an aeroplane. Finally we made 2D shape vehicles by drawing around shapes, cutting them out and creating a picture with them!

In English, our reading is steadily improving day by day and we are really enjoying reading our books. We are continuing to revise all our phonics, tricky words, Dolch words and blending words to enhance our reading skills even further. We like doing our stations each week and we are making great strides with our writing too. This month we focused on stories involving journeys. We liked listening to ‘We’re Going on a Bear Hunt’ by Michael Rosen and ‘The Snail and the Whale’ by Julia Donaldson.

In Gaeilge we are continuing to learn our songs, poems and phrases about Éadaí (Clothes) and we are about to start Siopadóireacht (Shopping). In Maths we continued to learn about money. This time we used real coins and had great fun investigating what they looked like, what symbols they had on them, how the coins differed on the back and we looked up where all the coins that we had came from! We also played the coin exchange game from our last blog using real coins, did some coin rubbings pictures, played shop with Ms. Olson and Mr. O’Connor using real coins and made towers of unifix cubes to denote each coin value! We also revised sorting and sorted shapes for up to four properties – colour, shape, size and thickness. Sorting for one property at a time was two easy for us so we sorted for two and three properties at the same time! We also did lots of addition sums within 5 and 10, revised before and after, more and less and revised our 2D and 3D shapes.

Most of our S.E.S.E learning this month was learning about our chicks but we also learned about vehicles and transport during Aistear time and we planted sunflowers too. Look at how they’ve grown – unfortunately they got a little bit dry over the bank holiday but we’re hopeful they’ll spring back to life (fingers crossed!!)

In Art we made egg box Dublin Buses and paper plate sunflowers as well as the couple of pieces we made in Aistear up above. Take a look!

In Music we learnt songs surrounding the theme of horse and ponies. The songs were lots of fun and we liked pretending to be horses whilst singing! In S.P.H.E. we completed our Stay Safe Programme and in P.E. we were so lucky to have Catherine Casey back in with us to do a few dance sessions as well as ball skills with Coach Steve from Shankill GAA. We also did gymnastics with our teacher, practising our jumping and rolling skills!

That must have been a record long blog but we had to tell you all about our chicks! We hoped you liked reading about our time in school during the month of May. We will have our final blog of the year up during the last week of school. We cannot believe our time in Junior Infants is nearly over! We are getting so grown up!

Category: Junior Infants, Literacy, Numeracy, Gaeilge, Aistear, S.E.S.E, Art, Music, Drama, S.P.H.E, Physical Education | Comments Off

January 24 2021

Christmas in Ms. Olson’s Junior Infants!

We had a fantastic month in December as we were doing lots of fun activities surrounding our theme – Christmas, and we were visited by our elf – Snowflake!

In Aistear, we absolutely loved playing in the Post Office / Santa’s Workshop Home Corner. During the first week in December, we wrote our letters to Santa and posted them to the North Pole in our very own postbox. We had to buy stamps from the Post Office first. Afterwards, the Post Person delivered the letters to Santa and his elves. Santa designed the toys in his workshop and the elves made and wrapped the toys. Once checked off by Santa, he packed his sack and delivered the toys to all the children. His reindeers helped him to fly his sleigh! In week two, we focused on sending Christmas cards in the Post Office!

We also enjoyed playing Small World in Aistear. The children set up their town and pretended that the post person was coming to deliver letters and parcels. At night time, Santa came and delivered all his presents. We liked our playdough station too, we made lots of cookies and cakes for Santa. We also baked real cookies for Santa, but we decided they wouldn’t last until Christmas so we had to eat them ourselves! During the last week of school, we had freeplay and enjoyed choosing our own toys to play with!

In English, we continued learning our Jolly Phonics sounds. We are improving everyday at learning our Tricky Words and our blending is coming along so well too. Soon we will be able to read little books! We enjoyed reading lots of Christmas and Winter themed books including ‘Bear Snores On’ by Karma Wilson, ‘One Snowy Night’ by Nick Buttersworth, ‘The Jolly Postman’ and ‘The Jolly Christmas Postman’ by Allan and Janet Ahlberg.Our handwriting is really coming along too, we started our handwriting workbook and we enjoyed writing a short letter to Santa as well as simple sentences in our copy books.

In Maths, we learned how to sort objects according to two properties. We also learned about time. We focused on learning the days of the week as well as sequencing stories such as ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ by Eric Carle. We enjoyed playing lots of time challenges and we timed them by counting the number of claps it took to complete the challenge. We compared the times it took to do two different challenges when we played the game, ‘Who Finishes First?’. One child had to do an activity such as building a tower of unifix cubes whilst the other child had to do a physical activity such as jumping jacks. We had to guess who would finish first and then test out our theories!

We did lots of Christmas art this month including Christmas elves, stained-glass Nativity scenes, cardboard angels, handprint robins, Christmas wreaths and Christmas cards! Take a look at our creations. All of the Fourth Classes made houses and created a Winter Wonderland! We got to visit it, it was so pretty.

In S.P.H.E., we learned about our senses and our families. In P.E., we had lots of fun doing Ball Skills with Coach Steve from Shankill GAA and we started doing dance with our teacher. We started learning a dance routine to ‘I just can’t wait to be King!’ from ‘The Lion King’.

As if all of that wasn’t enough, we also performed our Christmas play – ‘Our First Nativity’ which we had been working so hard on for several weeks. We recorded it for our parents so that we could sit and watch it together. It was a roaring success! Afterwards, we had a lovely party to celebrate!

Thanks for reading our blog, we hope you enjoyed it. Hopefully by the time you read our next blog, we’ll be back together in school again!

Category: Junior Infants, Literacy, Numeracy, Gaeilge, Aistear, S.E.S.E, Art, Drama, Physical Education | Comments Off

January 22 2020

December News from Ms. Olson’s Class!

Our theme for December was Christmas of course and we were delighted to be joined by our Elf on the Shelf – Snowflake and we loved opening our Advent calendar each day!

In Aistear, we absolutely loved playing in the home corner as it was the Post Office and Santa’s Workshop! First we had to write our Santa letters and post them in our very own post box! Then Santa himself read the letters and told the elves what they had to make in the workshop. The toys went through some serious quality control too before they were wrapped and put into Santa’s sack to be delivered to all the children. The Head Elf even had her clipboard out at one stage and sent some toys back as she wasn’t happy with the wrapping!! We also enjoyed playing small world as Santa had to deliver all the presents to the children with help from the reindeer on his sleigh. Those elves were getting quite hungry from all their hard work too so we made some playdough cookies for them to munch on in another Aistear station. Towards the end of December we actually made real chocolate chip cookies for Santa, however, we thought they might get a bit stale before he came so we had to eat them ourselves. Oops!! Finally we made 2D and 3D shapes out of marshmallows and cocktail sticks.

In English we continued to learn our phonics and practise our letter formation. We are also beginning to read short words using our tap and stroke blending method. Soon we will be ready to start reading short books! We enjoyed engaging with the stories ‘One Snowy Night’ by Nick Buttersworth and ‘Bear Snores On’ by Karma Wilson. We also wrote our own Santa letters as our handwriting is improving so much! In Gaeilge we were of course learning about ‘An Nollaig’ (Christmas). We especially loved singing the song ‘Tá Daidí na Nollaig ag Teacht Anois’. In Maths we continued to learn all about number – doing counting games, number games and writing our numerals, however, we also started learning about time. We loved learning ‘The Days of the Week Song’ and recording the time it took us to do an activity by counting the number of claps it took!

In S.E.S.E, we learnt about the signs of Winter. As it was Christmas we explored the theme of toys. We spoke about play spaces and keeping them clean and tidy, we discussed our favourite toys and we learnt about the differences between toys now and toys from the past. We sequenced the story of Christmas and spoke about Christmas traditions and we also explored and experimented with our five senses. We tasted different foods, we smelled different items, we played the feely bag game, we investigated sound with a tin and a rubber band and we played games to realise how important our eyes are and how we need to look after them. As a final little activity we made fake snow using the non-toxic substance from nappies – poly sodium acrylate.

We were very busy making Christmas in December. We made elves, Christmas wreaths, Christmas tree decorations, stain glass effect Nativity scenes, winter robins, angels and Christmas cards. Take a look!

In Music we sang some lovely songs including ‘Jog along Little Donkey’; ‘Féach ar an Mainséar’ and ‘Santa Claus is coming to Town’. We also listening to some pieces of music and responded to them through discussion and movement. We loved doing Dance with Ms. Casey in December – some of our dances can be found on our twitter feed @MsOlsonsClass and we got to perform on stage at assembly in front of Junior Infants, Senior Infants and First Class! We said a poem – ‘A Chubby Little Snowman’ and sang the songs ‘When Santa Got Stuck up the Chimney’; ‘Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer’ and ‘Jingle Bells / Bualadh Bos’. It was a lot of fun! Finally, probably the biggest thing that happened in December was we performed our Nativity play – Our First Nativity, for our parents. It was a roaring success and everyone was so proud of us because we had been practising so hard since midterm to put on a great show! We can’t believe that we are now in our second term of Junior Infants already but stay tuned as there is so much more to come in 2020!

Category: Junior Infants, Literacy, Numeracy, Aistear, S.E.S.E, Art, Music, Drama | Comments Off

October 14 2019

September News from Ms. Olson’s New Junior Infant Class!

Welcome to our first blog post as Ms. Olson’s New Junior Infant Class! We are so happy to have started big school in St. Anne’s and we have all settled in well to school life. We had a fantastic first day of school meeting our new friends and our teacher – take a look!

For our first month in Junior Infants we learned about Homes and Houses. In Aistear we had great fun doing lots of different activities each week. In the socio-dramatic play corner, we enjoyed playing in the kitchen making dinner; acting out the different parts in ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’ and pretending to be the Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf! We did lots of construction activities such as playing with Lego, Duplo, Stickle Bricks and Straws – we made things like houses for the Three Little Pigs and different sized furniture for Goldilocks and the Three Bears. We enjoyed playing with playdough – we made furniture for houses; bricks, sticks and straws for the Three Little Pigs’ houses and different sized bowls of porridge for Goldilocks. We also practised our cutting and sticking skills whilst sequencing the stories of Goldilocks and the Three Little Pigs and we enjoyed playing with the farm animals in small world.

In English we have been learning our Jolly Phonics. We have enjoyed learning the songs and actions which we practise everyday. We have finished the first set of phonics and are now on to our second set. We like playing games to learn our sounds such as ‘I spy’ and ‘Hide and Seek’ with flashcards – our teacher hides sounds around the classroom which we have to find and when we find them we have to say a word that contains the sound. After we have learned a sound we colour in our Jolly Phonics book and we have stations to practise letter formation. These stations include drawing the sound in sand, making it using playdough / counters / pegboards and writing it on mini whiteboards. Once we have mastered this, we practise writing the sound in our Jolly Phonics book. We learnt lots of poems and nursery rhymes which have helped us to understand rhyming and we have read lots of stories – we especially love all the Julia Donaldson books!

In Maths we have been doing lots of counting games – forwards and backwards to ten. We like making human number lines, counting with our counting stick, listening to objects being dropped into a tin and counting the sounds and we love when the naughty fairy comes and messes up our number line for us to fix! We have learnt how to sort objects by colour, shape, size and type. We have been practising writing our numbers, making sets of specific numbers and learning about patterns.

In Gaeilge we have learned lots of songs and phrases relating to the themes Mé Féin (Myself) and Sa Bhaile (Home). We particularly like the songs ‘Tá Teidí ag siúl’ and ‘Rólaí Pólaí’. In S.E.S.E (Science, Geography and History), we learnt about ourselves, our families, our school, homes and electricity. We went on a tour of the school and mapped out our journey using shapes and bricks. In the picture below – the yellow hexagons depict classrooms, the bricks depict the corridors and the green Lego pieces depict the three yards. We learnt about the different rooms in homes, things you might find in those rooms and activities that happen there. We looked at homes in the past and we did a class poll to see what type of home everyone lived in. We learned about electricity and we investigated making static electricity. We managed to make our hair stand up, we attached a balloon to a wall, we picked up pieces of paper using a balloon and we bent water in the tap using a balloon!

In Art, we drew and painted our self portraits, we made 2D shape houses and we made the The Three Little Pigs’ houses of straw, sticks and bricks. We have learned lots of songs in Music – our personal favourites are ‘Stepping Over Stepping Stones’ and ‘The Grand Old Duke of York’ as they are both marching songs. We love to start our day with a song! In Drama we explored and dramatised the story ‘A Squash and a Squeeze’ – we thought it was so funny when Ms. Olson pretended to be the Old Woman and we had to help her!

To finish off, we love doing Gymnastics on a Wednesday with Ms. Tighe and Ball Skills with Steve on a Friday. We also enjoy doing our fine motor stations every afternoon where we practise our cutting skills, writing our names and developing our hand muscles to help us when we begin writing. We hope you enjoyed reading our blog – we know its very long but we have packed so much into one short month that we had to share it all with you! Check back in with us next month to find out what we got up to in October!

Category: Junior Infants, Literacy, Numeracy, Gaeilge, Aistear, S.E.S.E, Art, Drama, Physical Education | Comments Off

June 28 2019

Farewell from Senior Infants!

Wow what a last month in Senior Infants! This year has flown by! We are so ready for First Class now.

In Aistear, we had lots of fun playing in the Travel Agents booking our holidays for the summer. We also enjoyed sand play and we did a little treasure hunt whereby we had to find magnetic letters in the sand which made words relating to summer. We played with small world, Lego, magnets and best of all we got to play with the BeeBots and the BeeBot maze!

In English, we read the story ‘Winnie and Wilbur at the Seaside’. We did some fun sequencing jigsaws and sentence reconstruction relating to the text. We also wrote a book review on the story. We learned about postcards this month. We looked at different postcards that some children had brought in and then we worked on writing our own. In Gaeilge we finished off ‘Siopadóireacht’ (Shopping) and did ‘An Trá’ (The Seaside). We also learned a well-known song ‘Can’t Stop the Feeling’ as Gaeilge and added dance moves. In Maths, we continued learning about subtraction and we learned about spatial awareness – left, right and all the prepositions. In the last week we got to work the BeeBots you can check out our twitter @MsOlsonsClass to see videos of how they work!

In S.E.S.E, we had a great month because we incubated hen eggs and hatched three chicks. They are called Michael D. Chickens, Charles Chickens and Chick Chock! It took 21 days for the chicks to hatch and we had to keep them under an infrared light to keep them warm afterwards. We also looked at different sea materials, we learned about floating and sinking, magnets, sound, the Titanic and different sea creatures. Did you know that an Octopus has three hearts and blue blood?

In Music we learned some songs including ‘Jackie the Sailor’, ‘Chuaigh mé go dtí an Trá’ and we listened to different pieces of music. We also learned some well-known songs including ‘A Million Dreams’ (which we performed at assembly) and ‘How Far We’ll Go’ from Moana. In Art we made some lovely multi-sensory crab pictures using sand and bun cases. We also copied Van Gogh’s Sunflowers! They turned out really well. In Drama we read the story ‘The Rainbow Fish’ and did some activities based on the story. We also went on our school tour to Greenane Maze we had so much fun exploring the mazes, playing games, looking at farm animals and going on a nature walk. On our last few days we had a pizza party and an ice-cream party! We are so lucky!

We have had a great year but we are ready for our Summer Holidays! We hope you have enjoyed reading our blogs this year. We will be back again in September!

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

May 28 2019

The End of Year Show!

For the last few weeks we have been doing dance. We are doing it with Ms. Casey. We are practising for the End-of-Year Show. This year we are performing ‘Cinderella Rockerfella’. Sixth class are acting in the show. Here is the cast list for some of the main parts;

Cinderella – Jennifer

Rockerfella – Saibh

Buttons – Meghan

Dan – Ella

Ugly Sisters – Oisin and Charlie

Fairy Godmother – Lauren

I interviewed Ms.Aivalikli and she said her class have been working very hard on the play and have started practising it on stage. Every class from 2^nd to 5^th are doing the dances. I am doing a dance which includes a lot of different moves such as freeze frames and the box step. Part of our routine even includes cowboy hats.

Cool Fact – Ms.Casey used to teach me ballet!

Why not come and see the show for yourself, It’ll be a lot of fun!

By Pearl Fitzpatrick

Category: Media Team, Music, Drama | Comments Off

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