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 six fluffy chicks called Fluffy, Little Timmy, Cheddar, Nuggets, Sockie and Sonny! 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 every student in the school had the opportunity to visit them before they left and were given a chance to name them!

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, racing car, train and aeroplane! We constructed different vehicles using a variety of different materials including Lego, Duplo, polydrons and stickle bricks. 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 labelling an aeroplane. We created our own small world group pictures and labelled all the vehicles. Finally we made 2D shape vehicles by drawing around shapes 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 were so lucky to be invited to paired reading with sixth class in our brand new outdoor classroom! We really enjoyed it! We are making great strides with our writing too. Monday to Thursday we do writing stations – we do one station each day. Usually our stations are: news writing; complete the sentence; sentence writing (we build the sentences with flashcards and then write them into our copies) and a CVC worksheet (consonant-vowel-consonant three letter words e.g. cat). We are working on dictation at the moment, each morning we practise writing a few words and on Fridays we put those words together to make a sentence. We also love to do free-writing when we can write about whatever we like unaided. 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 An Aimsir (The Weather) and we are about to start Siopadóireacht (Shopping). In Maths we revised sorting and sorted shapes for up to four properties – colour, shape, size and thickness. We also did lots of addition sums within 5 and 10, practised our number formation, made sets within 10 and revised our 2D and 3D shapes. We also learnt about data and gathered and represented data about boys and girls in the class, eye colour, hair colour, shoe colour and favourite treats. We represented the data on pictograms.

Most of our S.E.S.E learning this month was learning about our chicks but we also learned about vehicles and transport and we looked at transport in the past. We learnt about the life cycle of plants and sunflowers before planting our own sunflowers too.

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 P.E. we were so lucky to have Coach Steve from Shankill GAA back in with us to do a few ball skills sessions. We also did gymnastics with our teacher and learnt how to do a forward roll as well as having our weekly sessions with Coach Ed.

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! Finally, here are pictures of hopefully many more picnics to come!

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

May 30 2022

April News from Ms. Olson’s Junior Infants!

Although April was a short month with our Easter Holidays, we packed a lot in! Our theme for the month was ‘Clothes and the Weather’.

In Aistear, we enjoyed acting out the story ‘The Scarecrows’ Wedding’ by Julia Donaldson in the Farm Home Corner. We also enjoyed having the wedding breakfast and party! We made ‘jewellery’ for Betty O’Barley from the story using beads and buttons in patterns. We designed a wedding cake for Harry and Betty using shapes in patterns and we started creating our own Betty and Harry scarecrows. In week two we enjoyed our time in the weather station. We pretended to be meteorologists and we gave the weather forecast on the television for our classmates. We made beautiful cloud and rainbow mobiles and we dressed paper dolls for the correct weather with a cut and stick exercise. Finally, we loved engaging with water play! We had lots of bubbly water, cups, jugs, bowls, spades etc. and enjoyed filling containers and pouring the water out!

In English, we are loving being able to read independently. We read our differentiated readers when we have finished our work. We have finished our Jolly Phonics now and we spent the time revising our vowel and consonant digraphs. We are working hard at our letter formation and we are beginning to write our news independently too. We enjoyed reading and engaging with the story ‘The Smartest Giant in Town’ by Julia Donaldson and loved the kindness displayed by the Giant to people in need. We had a lovely time dressing up as our favourite characters and bringing in our favourite books for Book Week. We went to the Book Fair and were able to get some new books. There was also a competition for the best costumes – won by Dogman and Little Red Riding Hood!

In Gaeilge, we’ve enjoyed learning phrases, songs and poems surrounding the theme of ‘An Aimsir’ (The Weather). In Maths, we started learning about money. Money is a tricky topic to grasp especially in relation to the idea that a 2c or a 5c coin is more valuable than a 1c coin even though they are all single coins! To teach this concept, we start out with coin tokens instead of real coins. A coin token has dots on them to denote whether it is a 1c, 2c, or 5c coin. We played a fun exchange game whereby we exchanged 1cs for 2cs and when we had enough – for 5cs too. Once we had grasped the idea of the tokens, we used real coins to play the game. We also had great fun investigating what real coins 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 did some coin rubbings pictures, and played shop with Ms. Olson using real coins.

In S.E.S.E we finished learning about animals and the farm and made our own butter. We shook cream in a jar until it started to whip before solidifying into butter. We poured off the buttermilk, added some salt and spread it on some bread. It was very tasty! We were very lucky to go and visit the school pond to see our newts too. Thanks to our caretaker, Ogie, for showing us! We also learned about the weather and the water cycle. We enjoyed learning about different types of precipitation and investigated the different states of water – solid, liquid and gas.

In Art, we farm animals using paper plates and Easter cards for our families. We created a nest of eggs using potato stamps and decorated the eggs with little gems. We made finger print Easter Bunny silhouettes as well. We also completed our scarecrows that we had begun in Aistear. Take a look!

In Music, we continued to start our day with a song and we particularly liked the song ‘Cúig Ubh’ and ‘Jig-a-Jog Jig’! In S.P.H.E we completed the Stay Safe Programme and in P.E., we finished our dance sessions with Catherine Casey School of Dance and enjoyed learning our fundamental skills with Coach Ed. We also started doing gymnastics with our teacher. After our warm up, we do four gymnastics stations working on our jumping, hopping, rolling and cartwheel skills. We love doing ‘Jelly Belly’ as a cool down too!

On our last day of term, we had a lovely Easter egg hunt and we enjoyed colouring Easter pictures!

That’s all for now, check back in soon to see how we got on in May with our lovely chicks! Here’s a sneak peek!

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

March 29 2022

February News from Ms. Olson’s Junior Infants!

We had another busy month in Junior Infants! Our theme for February was 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, our own dream houses 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 designing our own houses. We also enjoyed acting out the stories in the puppet theatre and with the doll’s house in small world.

In English we continued to learn our Jolly Phonics and Tricky Words and we enjoyed playing phonics games. We enjoyed engaging with the book – ‘A Squash and a Squeeze’ by Julia Donaldson and we started reading our own differentiated readers! We are loving using our blending skills to decipher all the words in the book and we are making such progress. We participated in the ‘Write a Book’ competition and produced a fantastic book about a little polar bear cub called Fluffy and her friend, a snowy owl, called Snowy. We worked on our storytelling skills first through playing with Rory Story Cubes and then each person in our class suggested a sentence for our story. We worked really hard on the writing and pictures and sent it off to be judged. Fingers crossed!

In Gaeilge we enjoyed learning about ‘Sa Bhaile’ (At Home). We liked learning one song in particular ‘Dhá Éan Bheaga’ as it is the Gaeilge version of ‘Two Little Birdies Sitting in a Tree’! In Maths we followed on from partitioning and combining within five and learnt the number stories for four! We also enjoyed learning about capacity. We used the story of ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’ to investigate the how much each bears’ porridge bowl could hold. We also had a popcorn party for Goldilocks and had to decide which container would be the most suitable for holding the popcorn! We enjoyed eating the popcorn too! We also celebrated Pancake Tuesday in Junior Infants and enjoyed sequencing how to make a pancake before eating our own! Yum!

In S.E.S.E (Science, Geography and History), we learnt about homes, magnets and electricity. 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! We also had lots of fun exploring with magnets. We investigated a range of materials to see if they were magnetic and moved iron filings around a dish!

In P.E. we focused on the Games strand of the curriculum. We love playing our warm up games and then practising dribbling with unihoc sticks. We also worked on passing the ball to our partner, striking the ball into a goal, doing dribbling relays and we finished up the Games strand with a game of hockey!

In Art, we made lovely ‘I Love You to the Moon and Back’ Valentine’s Day cards for our parents. We also drew and painted our dream houses. In Music we learnt lots of songs about Teddy Bears including ‘I have a Small Teddy’; ‘Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear’; ‘The Three Bears’ and Tá Teidí Agamsa’.

We hope you enjoyed our blog, tune in next month to hear what we got up to!

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

December 15 2021

November News from Ms. Treacy’s Fifth Class!

We had another busy month during November in Room 17!

In maths, we spent the month working on fractions – equivalent, improper, mixed number while also learning to add and subtract them. Lots of practice with real life problem solving with fractions helped us develop our understanding of this concept.

In English, we looked at the theme of narrative writing with the story ‘Out of My Mind’ and then explored explanatory writing through the theme of ‘volcanoes’. We learnt lots about how volcanoes form and erupt and even wrote our own explanations about volcanoes. We also practiced some more explanations about a variety of topics when working in groups – how does a chicken egg hatch, the water cycle, the lifecycle of a butterfly, the lifecycle of a frog and how do tadpoles grow – excellent explanations by all!

As Gaeilge, bhíomar ag foghlaim faoi na topaicí ‘An Scoil’ agus ‘Éadaí’. Bhí scéalta agus léamhtuiscintí againn bunaithe ar na téamaí seo. Bhíomar ag dul i ngleic leis na Briathra neamhrialta san Aimsir Chaite chomh maith le tús a chur ar an Aimsir Fháistineach. Bhíomar ag cleachtadh conas an chlog a léamh as Gaeilge freisin.

In SESE, we completed a lot of work based on the theme of ‘volcanoes’. We learned about how volcanoes form and the inner structure of them while also researching them using the iPads and completing a fact file about a chosen volcano.

We used the iPads to research facts about Italy and Roman life and completed fact files about each of them. We did another excellent job on our projects based on a figure from The Renaissance, with lots of wonderful research and presentation skills on show.

As part of Science week, we researched a famous scientist and completed a fact file about them. We also wrote some wonderful ‘Science week’ themed acrostic poems. We really enjoyed the ‘Balloon car challenge’, where we focused on the concept of forces. This month, we also learnt about the structure of the eye and the functions of these parts.

The highlight of the month was definitely the clay volcanoes we made and painted and then erupted by creating a chemical reaction.

We really enjoyed spending some time completing some ‘Hour of Code’ Minecraft tutorials on the iPads to introduce many of us to the world of coding.

We leant the song ‘Pompeii’ le Bastille i nGaeilge agus ‘Fanfaidh mé ortsa’ le Mumford and Sons freisin.

In SPHE, we have been looking at the concept of ‘Friendship’ – exploring the benefits and the challenges faced within them. We also explored some scenarios to extend our thinking while also identifying what we look for in a friend.

In Art, we designed some Roman inspired mosaic artwork and Winter/Christmas themed snow globes.

In PE, we were very lucky to have Jonathan in from Leinster Rugby teaching us some rugby skills and playing some fun team games to practice our skills. We also started cycling with Tony and Graham and we are really enjoying learning how to cycle safely.

Category: Fifth Class, Literacy, Numeracy, Gaeilge, S.E.S.E, Art | Comments Off

November 18 2021

October News from Ms. Treacy’s Fifth Class!

October was another busy month in Room 17!

We were focusing on writing letters at the beginning of the month – highlighting reasons why schools should have drinking fountains. At the end of the month, we wrote some excellent Halloween acrostic poems and some spooktacular Halloween themed narratives for Ms Travers’ writing competition. In addition, we definitely have some future politicians amongst us as we presented some excellent arguments during some informal debates.

Sa Ghaeilge, bhíomar ag leanúint le na scéalta agus ag cur snas ar ár dtuiscint don Aimsir Chaite agus briathra éagsúla. Freisin, bhí an-spraoi againn le foclóir Oíche Shamhna a fhoghlaim agus roinnt dánta a ghabhann leis an téama seo.

In maths, we focused on the themes of Time and Lines and Angles and concluded this topic with some tangram work which we really enjoyed.

In SESE, we were busy learning about The Normans, The Solar System and examining the surface tension of water and the effect of acid. We also had great fun designing, making and testing our egg protectors for the ‘Egg Drop Challenge’ – with varying degrees of success! Although the definite highlight was the amazing projects we completed about ‘World Changing Women’ – great insights shared into many inspirational women!

We continued to learn some new songs -‘An t-Ádh Night’ by Pharell our latest addition. We’ve really been enjoying the music resources on DableDoo too!

We created wonderful self-portraits this month using our drawing skills and symmetry with wonderful outcomes. We also created some haunted scene artwork using our different paint mixing techniques and silhouettes.

Finally, as part of the school’s Well-being initiative and for this month’s theme of ‘Talking Care of my Body’ we made some wonderful dreamcatchers and made some tasty fruit skewer treats to enjoy!

We showed off our wonderful Halloween costumes on the last day before the Midterm – lots of happy smiley faces!

Category: Fifth Class, Literacy, Numeracy, Gaeilge, S.E.S.E, Art | Comments Off

June 30 2021

Our Final Month in Ms. Olson’s Junior Infants!

Wow! What a year it has been in Junior Infants! We have learnt so much and are now ready to go into Senior Infants at the end of August. We might have missed a couple of months of school in our second term but we surely made up for it online and when we came back to school. We ploughed full speed ahead with our literacy and we are now competent emergent readers! Everyone has made so much progress this year and it has been lovely to watch the children’s growth and development throughout the course of the year. Although the month of June symbolises the end of the year and a wind down to the holidays, we packed an awful lot of content in!

In Aistear, we loved playing in the Ice-Cream Parlour Home Corner. We pretended to be the shop assistants serving delicious ice-creams and sundaes and as customers we found it so tricky to pick our ice-creams from all the mouth-watering flavours in the ice-cream fridge! At the construction station, we enjoyed building ice-cream vans and making ice-creams out of playdough. We learnt about the life cycle of a butterfly through story and a cut and stick activity and we packed our suitcases with clothes for our holidays the following week with another cut and stick worksheet. It was great fun heading off to the beach in small world and making jellyfish mobiles using paper plates, paint, strips of crepe paper and bubble wrap at the art table. Probably our favourite stations of all were the exploratory play stations – we loved doing free play with sand, water and magnets!

In English, we continued to revise our Jolly Phonics, we learnt about the magic ‘e’ and we loved singing along to Jack Hartmann’s word family songs on YouTube as well as the letter songs from Have Fun Teaching. We continued with our writing stations and worked really hard at our free-writing this month. We are now able to write our news with very little support from our teacher! Our theme for the month was ‘The Sea / Summer’ and we read so many great stories this month including ‘Commotion in the Ocean’ by Giles Andreae, ‘Winnie at the Seaside’ by Valerie Thomas, ‘The Rainbow Fish’ by Marcus Pfister and ‘Tiddler’ by Julia Donaldson. We also enjoyed reading our own stories and we are progressing through the levels of our Oxford Reading Tree books at a great rate! If anyone would like to continue reading these over the summer, you can access them at https://www.oxfordowl.co.uk/.

In Gaeilge, we finished off Éadaí (Clothes) and Siopadóireacht (Shopping) and have lots of fun singing the songs, learning the phrases and playing the games on Bua na Cainte. In maths, we revised lots of the topics and concepts we have learnt this year including sorting, 2D and 3D shapes, pattern, width and length, addition within 5 and 10, capacity and we had lots of fun doing a Maths Trail. We adored learning about spatial awareness with our friend BeeBot. He is a little bee robot that we had to code or programme to travel to certain places. Each day our table was given a new mat to navigate BeeBot around – these were a 2D shape mat, a 3D shape mat, an alphabet mat and an adjustable maze. You can check out some videos of how BeeBot is programmed on our Twitter feed @MsOlsonsClass.

We did lots of fun S.E.S.E in June! In geography we learnt about the weather and recorded a week long weather diary. We had four days of lovely sunshine and one day of clouds! We also identified the signs of Summer and went back over what we knew about the four seasons. We learnt about clothes and sorted clothes according to season suitability and we learnt about the sea and some sea creatures. However, most importantly we learnt about water, and water safety. In history, we looked at how we have grown and changed in relation to clothes, we identified what kinds of clothes we wore as babies and what we wear now. We really enjoyed doing lots of science experiments this month. We investigated our shadows outside in the yard, we identified items that we magnetic and we did some fun static electricity experiments with balloons. We made our hair stand up, we stuck a balloon to a wall, we picked up pieces of paper with a balloon and we even changed the direction of water! We also learnt about heat and the effect of water on materials.

June was a great month for making crafts! We made lovely painted butterflies, jellyfish mobiles, Father’s Day cards and a fingerprint keepsake to remember our Junior Infants Class. In Music, we sang lots of songs and listening to some classic pieces of music to identify their moods and tempo. Our favourite song to sing was ‘Little Red Riding Hood’.

June was a special month in our school because it was Active Schools Month. We had so much fun doing lots of sports in June with a special thanks to Ms. Woods for all the organisation of the activities. We had a fantastic sports day where we completed eight different activities. These were sack races, hurdles, long jump, target throws, an obstacle course, penalty shoot outs, egg and spoon races and teddy bear relays! It was so much fun despite the rain and we all got a medal at the end!

Throughout Active Schools Month we continued to do our P.E., ball skills with Coach Steve from Shankill GAA and dance with Catherine Casey School of Dance but we also got to do some other fun activities including obstacle courses with Grainne and we had a very cool session with Bar Monkey!

We also had lots of fun in the sun during June with the good weather allowing picnics and great fun in the yard!

On the second last day we had an absolute ball on our school tour to Stonebridge Fields. We did lots of activities and played many games including an obstacle course, parachute fun and games, football, throwing and catching, skipping, chasing, Duck Duck Goose, Stuck in the Mud and during our freeplay we had fun making obstacle courses with the equipment and playing with the hula hoops! We also had a lovely picnic in the sun with some yummy crisps and ice-creams!

Here we are on our last day of Junior Infants – silly faces and all, how time has flown!

What a fantastic year it has been despite Covid! I will miss having this lovely class but I know that the children will have a wonderful time with their new teacher next year. I wish you all a lovely summer break and the very best of luck in Senior Infants!

Category: Junior Infants, Literacy, Numeracy, Gaeilge, Aistear, S.E.S.E, Art, 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.

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

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

April 22 2021

March News from Ms. Olson’s Junior Infants!

We were absolutely delighted to return to school in March! It was so exciting to see all of our friends again and to get back into our school routine. We missed out on some great Aistear themes in January and February so we decided to do them in March instead.

For the first two weeks, we loved learning about the Polar Regions. First, we explored Antarctica and it was such fun playing in our igloo and searching for penguins in the home corner. In small world, we created group pictures of Antarctica sticking on cotton wool for icebergs and pictures of Antarctica animals. We investigated floating and sinking and we labelled the parts of a penguin. Then, we moved to the Arctic! Again, we loved playing in our igloo but this time we were in search of polar bears! We also built snowmobiles out of Lego and Duplo, created igloos with playdough and labelled the parts of a polar bear.

For the last two weeks of March, we explored the theme of ‘Homes and Houses’. Our home corners we based on stories for this fortnight. We enjoyed acting out the stories of ‘The Three Little Pigs’ and ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’. In small world, we acted out the story of the ‘The Three Little Pigs’ and we did a sequencing the story cut and stick activity. We also made the three houses using straws, sticks and bricks. In the last week of March, we loved acting out ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’ using our puppet theatre! We also constructed different sized beds and chairs using Lego and Duplo and did another sequencing activity.

In English, we continued on with our Jolly Phonics sounds – playing games and activities; and we really got to work at learning our Tricky Words by playing games and listening to Tricky Words songs. We also started our reading books. We were reading books online at home but it was so nice to be able to read physical books again! We are getting so good at our reading now. Our blending skills are really improving as we are practising our word boxes in school and at home for homework. Another thing that we have been really working on is our writing! We love to write our news and we are enjoying practising our letter formation and free writing. During free writing, we write about whatever we like totally unaided and then our teacher scribes what we have written underneath. Our blending skills really help with this as we sound out words to write them! We love storytime at the end of the day in Junior Infants and we have been enjoying listening to ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’ by Roald Dahl. We’ve also read ‘The Emperor’s Egg’, ‘Lost and Found’, ‘The Polar Bear and the Snow Cloud’, ‘The Three Little Pigs’, ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’ and ‘A Squash and a Squeeze’.

In Irish, we’ve enjoyed learning songs and simple phrases surrounding the themes of ‘An Teilifís’ (The Television); ‘Lá ‘le Pádraig’ (St. Patrick’s Day) and ‘An Cháisc’ (Easter). In Maths, we revised the content that we had been doing online on Seesaw – partitioning and combining for 4 and 5. We liked using the baseboards to sort objects into subsets to make the stories of four and five and we enjoyed playing maths games to reinforce these concepts. We’ve also been learning about data. We collected data in our class about eye colour, hair colour and number of boys and girls and represented it on a pictogram / pictograph.

In S.E.S.E, we learned about the seven continents. We adored listening to and singing along to ‘The Continents Song’ on YouTube! We learned about the Irish explorer – Tom Crean, who went on expeditions to Antarctica as well as identifying lots of facts about penguins and polar bears. We were fascinated to learn that penguins can hold their breath underwater for up to thirty minutes and a polar bear’s fur is actually translucent – it just appears white! We also loved looking at pictures of icebergs and the northern lights! When we explored the theme of ‘Homes and Houses’, it was fun to identify what type of home we lived in and to chat about the different rooms in a house and the items you might find in each room!

In Art, we made some lovely cards including an ‘I Love You to the Moon and Back!’ card for our mums for Mother’s Day and a potato print ‘Eggs in a Nest’ card for Easter. We also made a St. Patrick’s Day headband and an Easter Bunny picture. Each morning, we start our day with a song and there were so many songs we loved singing this month, however, our favourite had to be ‘Boa Constrictor’ because it is so funny! We did a little St. Patrick’s Day concert for our parents singing ‘An Leipreachán’ (The Leprechaun); ‘Lá ‘le Pádraig’ (St. Patrick’s Day) and ‘Lámha Suas, An Feidir Leat? (Hands Up, Can You?). The videos can be found on our Twitter page – @MsOlsonsClass.

It was great to get back doing our GAA Ball Skills with Coach Steve from Shankill GAA and we’re having great fun learning a dance routine to ‘I Just Can’t Wait to Be King!’ from the Lion King. We will perform this soon and put it on our Twitter page! To finish off a great month back, we had a eggcellent Easter egg hunt on our last day of school! We are back for our last term now after our Easter holidays and are straight back to work! Stay tuned to hear about our April news! Bye for now! 🙂

Category: Junior Infants, Literacy, Numeracy, Gaeilge, Aistear, S.E.S.E, Art, 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 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 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!

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!

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

December 6 2020

Food Glorious Food in Ms. Olson’s Junior Infants!

In November, we explored the theme of ‘Food’. We had a lovely mid term break but we were delighted to be back and engaging in Aistear again! We visited the Pizzeria, the Bakery and the Supermarket in our home corner this month. We enjoyed playing the roles of the chefs, bakers, customers, waiting staff and shop assistants. In the pizzeria, we were greeted by the waiting staff, who showed us to our table and gave us our menu. When we had ordered our food the chef made us delicious pizzas. Afterwards, we had to pay our bill and if the service was good, we gave them a tip! Some people decided to order their pizza over the phone for delivery so the waiting staff had to answer the phones too. In the bakery, we enjoyed eating delicious treats baked by the baker – there was the option to sit in as well or you could browse the selection and get the cakes for take away. In the supermarket, we enjoyed using the shopping baskets to carry our food that we had selected from the shelves. We then put it all on the conveyor belt and the shop assistant scanned it for us and put it in to our shopping bags. We had to make sure that we got our receipts too!

We also enjoyed constructing the pizzeria and supermarket using Lego, Duplo and Sticklebricks. We used the small world people to play with our constructions afterwards. Some of our constructions had take-away only facilities replicating our lives at the moment! We did some great cut and stick activities this month including ‘How to Make Pizza’, sequencing the story of ‘The Little Red Hen’ and ‘How to Make a Jam Sandwich’. We also enjoyed making playdough cookies and cakes for the bakery.

In English, we continued on with our Jolly Phonics. We are getting very good at blending short words now and we are learning our Tricky Words! Soon we will be ready to start reading little books of our very own! Our writing is steadily improving and we are enjoying playing our phonics games and doing our fine motor stations each day. We read some great stories this month including ‘Pizza at Sally’s’; ‘The Tiger Who Came to Tea’, ‘The Little Red Hen’ and ‘The Enormous Crocodile’.

In Gaeilge, we have been enjoying exploring the theme ‘Bia’ (Food) using our Bua na Cainte interactive programme. Our listening skills as Gaeilge are greatly improving and we are finding the games much easier to play now! We enjoyed singing along to the food themed songs and learning simple phrases such as ‘Is maith liom ___’ (I like ___)

In Maths, we continued to focus on number work, engaging in activities such as counting games, number formation, making sets of numbers, learning about ordinal number (first, second, third etc.) and playing maths board games to develop one-to-one correspondence. We also explored different patterns such as ABC and AABB patterns. We made these patterns according to colour, shape, size and random objects. We learnt about length too! We did lots of timed exercises to see who could make the longest object with the materials provided within the time. We made objects of varied lengths using playdough, stickle bricks, interlocking links, beads and thread and interlocking cubes. Towards the end of the month, we had great fun with our friend BeeBot developing our spatial awareness skills as well as number and shape work.

In S.E.S.E our focus was on food and people at work! We looked at how pizza is made, who makes it and where it originates from – Italy. We learnt about the seven continents through singing the continents song on YouTube and discovered that Italy is shaped like a boot and is in Europe. We then tried our hand at making our own pizza! We learnt how the yeast makes the pizza dough rise. We left our dough to prove by the radiator and were amazed at how much it grew! We added our toppings and our margherita and pepperoni pizzas were delicious!

In Art, we made paper plate pizzas. In Music, we loved learning little songs including ‘Miss Polly Had a Dolly’ and ‘Down by the Station’. We also started learning the songs for our Christmas play!

In P.E., we had great fun practising our ball skills with Coach Steve from Shankill GAA. We are now learning how to do solos as well as bouncing and catching the ball. We also enjoyed doing games with our teacher. We were learning how to balance beanbags on rackets and how to control a beanbag and ball using a unihoc stick. We did some team relays with the rackets and unihoc sticks. It was great fun!

Finally, in S.P.H.E, we have been learning all about our five senses. We did a taste test to identify our four different tastes – sour, bitter, sweet and salty. We tasted the foods – natural yogurt, lemon, a jelly sweet and crisps to identify the different flavours. Some we weren’t so keen on!

Thank you so much for reading our blog, tune in next month to read about all things Christmas! It’s sure to be a cracker!! 🙂

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