News from Ms Livingston’s Class

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

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

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

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

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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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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