On Wednesday 2nd of October the two fifth classes went to Shankill Library. We went there to see an author called Brían Dungan.He wrote an amazing book called Wintour’s Game, which May Zanchetta, Anna Moloney, Emma Somers and Johann Conlon all read. Here are some of their honest reviews of
the book.
“The cover is amazing! I feel like in a book like this you just need a thief. If I could have powers I’d be an oracle!”
Emma Somers
“The cover really gives a great replication of the story .I love the way you think she’s bad and then all of a sudden she’s good.The guys that can freeze time are the best.
-Johann Conlon
“I think Brían is a very artistic and imaginative person. The book was really great and I’m looking
forward to part two.”
-Anna Moloney
“The book was really good,one of the best I’ve read.It was interesting and it also just kept you
wanting to read more.”
-May Zanchetta
Thank you to Patricia, the librarian for organizing this lovely outing.
Wow what a year it has been in Ms. Olson’s Second Class! We have really enjoyed ourselves over the year and we are ready for Third Class.
Here are our highlights from our final term!
English
We learnt all about report genre writing this term and we worked very hard at writing reports about different topics. We really enjoyed researching facts and information on the iPads to help us in writing our reports and they were a very interesting read! We also loved reading our class novel ‘The Twits’ by Roald Dahl.
Gaeilge
This term we enjoyed learning about ‘Bia’ (Food); ‘Sa Bhaile’ (At Home); An tEarrach (Spring), ‘Siopadóireacht’ (Shopping), ‘An Teilifís’ (Television) and ‘An Samhradh’ (Summer) and we are continuing to develop our reading, writing and oral language skills.
Maths
We love maths in Second Class and this term we focused on learning about money, rotations and angles, pattern, place value, number, how to subtract with renaming, learning our 2x multiplication tables, data, area and capacity. We really enjoyed coming up with questions to survey our class on before constructing graphs out of concrete materials and representing our data pictorially and abstractly on block diagrams. We also measured the area of different things and explored capacity by measuring and pouring.
Religion
We received our First Holy Communion on Saturday 18th May 2024. We had a very special ceremony in St. Anne’s Church celebrated by Fr. Michael O’Sullivan. We had been practising for a number of weeks before our Sacrament learning hymns, saying our readings and prayers and of course learning how to receive Communion. On the day we processed into the church with the priest as the choir sang beautifully in the background. Afterwards we went to the school for a party run by the PTA. The hall was decked out in gorgeous decorations and we had some much fun! On the Monday after our Communion we had our photographs taken and had a big party in the classroom with a yummy cake, lots of treats, music and dancing! We even had a game of ultimate tag out in the yard before home time. It truly was a very memorable occasion!
S.E.S.E
We learnt all about the weather and the water cycle in S.E.S.E. We conducted a couple of experiments including creating the water cycle in a zip lock bag and we made raining clouds using water, food colouring and shaving foam! We also had an amazing Stem Day towards the end of June. We investigated which material would make the best kite out of paper, bin bags, tinfoil, fabric and cardboard. The paper and bin bags proved to be the most successful. Other classes came to view our kites and we loved going around to other classes to see what they had made too!
S.P.H.E
We had a lovely Wellbeing Day this year in April! We enjoyed having extra yard time, playing card games, listening to music and doing some mindfulness colouring.
P.E.
We had a very busy Active Schools Week in May and it was so much fun! We had our sports day on Tuesday where we enjoyed doing basketball shoot outs, long jump, an obstacle course, relay races, hockey, croquet, penalty shoot outs, bean bag races and target throws. Team C was the winner of sports day but we all thoroughly enjoyed taking part! We also had lots of fun doing bowling, rugby and yoga throughout the week on top of our regular P.E. with Coach Ed, Dance with Ms. Casey and swimming on a Friday. On Friday afternoon we had our Family Fun Day up at Stonebridge Pitches. We had lots of fun doing circuits, penalty shoot outs, target throws, an obstacle course, egg and spoon races and three legged races! Our parents even joined in too. Afterwards we danced to music, had a picnic with lots of treats and enjoyed blowing bubbles and soaking our friends at the wet sponge throwing event! It was a fantastic day! We also headed up to the pitches on Monday for parachute fun!
Visual Arts
In Music, we had been working really hard to learn all our hymns for our First Holy Communion and we sang them beautifully on the day. We also continued on with our Dabbledoo lessons enjoying learning about the Pentatonic Scale. We made some beautiful art pieces for our Communion including First Holy Communion suncatchers and lovely salt dough crosses. We also made Father’s Day Cards and rainy day resist umbrella pictures. We used wax crayons to draw an umbrella and a straw to blow paint around it, we were able to wipe off any paint then off our umbrella!
School Tour
We had a fantastic time on our school tour to Fort Lucan. We loved the water slides, helter skelter, go-karts, mini golf and the playground!
Leaving Parties
We were sad to see three of our friends leave our class this year but we wish them all the best of luck in their new schools and we couldn’t let them leave without throwing them a farewell celebration! Best of luck in your new schools D, T and R!
What a fantastic year it has been in Second Class! 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 fantastic summer break and the very best of luck in Third Class!
We’ve had a very busy few months in Second Class! Here are some of our highlights from November to March:
English
We learnt about narrative writing and worked very hard at writing stories for the ‘Write a Book’ competition! We are eagerly awaiting the results to see if we have any winners! We had great fun bringing in our favourite books, making bookmarks, dressing up as our favourite characters on World Book Day and enjoyed swapping books at the book fair.
Gaeilge
We enjoyed learning about ‘An Scoil’ (School); ‘An Geimhreadh’ (Winter); ‘An Nollaig’ (Christmas); ‘Lá ‘le Pádraig’ (St. Patrick’s Day) and ‘An Chaisc’ (Easter) and are developing our reading, writing and oral language skills as Gaeilge. We had a fabulous Seachtain na Gaeilge participating in a céilí, a parade and Gaeilge poster competition!
Maths
We’ve been having fun exploring different maths topics including Number; Pattern; Symmetry; 3-D Shapes; Time; Place Value; Fractions, Length and Weight. We enjoyed making fairy buns and pancakes as part of our learning and loved our maths orienteering Easter egg hunt on the last day of term.
Religion
We received the Sacrament of Reconciliation on 27th February and created beautiful art to decorate the church.
S.E.S.E – Geography, History and Science
We were fascinated learning about Space, Winter, Christmas, The Rainforest, China and Myths and Legends. We made satellites and space rovers with Lego WeDo 2.0 and used the iPads to code them to move. We also enjoyed creating Santa’s Sleigh out of different materials including wood, clay, plastic, cardboard and Lego WeDo 2.o for our Stem Exhibition.
P.E.
We were so lucky to have five different coaches teaching us different skills – Coach Steve from Shankill GAA for Ball Skills; Coach Deirdre and Coach Alberto for Gymnastics; Coach Ed for Games including Hockey and Coach Jim from Cricket Ireland. We also had a special visit from Coach Steve who brought the Sam Maguire Cup for us to see and hold!
S.P.H.E
We have been focusing on our wellbeing and have been enjoying doing activities in our wellbeing journals. We also enjoyed participating in Secret Santa in our class! We had a ‘Crazy Hair Day’ to raise money for the school and we were very thankful to R in our class for bringing in goodies for World Down Syndrome Day too!
Visual Arts – Music, Art and Drama
We have loved doing our Dabbledoo Music lessons. We created beautiful Advent wreaths, Christmas Tree suncatchers, Snowmen, Recycled Christmas Cards, Rainforest Dioramas, Chinese Dragons, Valentine’s Day Cards, Spring Flowers using pointillism, St. Patrick’s Day bodhráns for our parade, Mother’s Day cards and Easter cards in Art. Finally we put on a fabulous performance of ‘The Night Before Christmas’ for our families and had a ‘wrap’ party. We also went to a show ‘Polar Bear and Penguin’ in the Mermaid Theatre, Bray on the DART to get some inspiration before our own performance!
To mark the end of a very successful term, The Media Team were treated to cupcakes and hot chocolate which inspired this poem!
Cupcakes
Cupcakes are so nice to eat,
Super good and super sweet.
Chocolate bubbles in my mouth,
Spongy stuff roams about.
When I swallow it down my throat,
The gooey stuff starts to float.
Now come the sprinkles 1,2,3
How very lucky can I be?
By Laura and Bel
Winter is over now,
Going into Spring, Spring is a wonderful Springy thing.
Lots of weather changes and nice flowers,
Nice green trees and more bright hours.
More greenery, baby animals.
Kids are playing, they’re best pals.
Winter is over now going into Spring.
Spring is a wonderful Springy thing.
By Tori Bailey and Eve Cassidy
We had a busy month in October as we explored two themes – Space and Halloween! In English we enjoyed reading our class novel ‘Flat Stanley in Space’ and learning some comprehension strategies including predicting and visualising to help us understand the story better. We were able to use these strategies later on in the month to help us to comprehend our class reader ‘The Witch’s Lair’. We continued with our literacy stations and moved onto guided work with our explanatory genre writing and worked together to write about the lifecycle of a pumpkin. We also explored narrative genre writing as we wrote Halloween stories for a competition. We had a winner for the story competition and another for the bake off competition on our dress up / cake sale day before the Halloween break! Here is our ring finder too from our barm brack!
In Gaeilge we enjoyed learning songs and phrases based on the theme ‘An Fomhár’ (Autumn) and ‘Oíche Shamhna’ (Halloween). We enjoy playing games to learn vocabulary and chatting with our partners as Gaeilge to develop our conversational skills.
In Maths we continued with our two warm up activities – table champs and daily challenge which we love playing and we started some new numbers concepts including addition, estimating, rounding, greater than, less than, equal to and subtraction. We continued learning about 2D shapes and starting learning about 3D shapes. We enjoyed playing games with playing cards and using concrete materials to learn about these topics. We also loved playing loop cards which test our addition and subtraction knowledge. We enjoy going to the maths table to work with the teacher on our Busy at Maths if we need some help or for just a quieter learning space. After we have finished we like taking an activity from the maths table such as geoboards, tangrams, addition and subtraction peg boards or 2D shapes for creating shape pictures.
In S.E.S.E we loved learning all about the different planets of the solar system and about the work of astronauts. We enjoyed watching videos of some astronauts in the International Space Station, learning how they sleep, move around and even how they use the toilet!! We created beautiful planet pictures in art using sponge printing and did some fun rocket experiments! We also learnt about Halloween and its origins as well as Halloween traditions around the world. Ms. Kelly organised a fantastic Halloween trail around the school for us too. We loved collecting items for our Autumn nature table and exploring all the different things using magnifying glasses as an early finisher activity.
In Art we made some really cool Halloween lanterns using a glass jar and crepe paper and patterned pumpkins. We also had to create our design for our Christmas cards fundraiser.
In Music we learnt the song ‘One Way or Another’ from Hocus Pocus 2. We also developed our skills of pitch, structure, duration, rhythm and timbre by singing ‘Bingo’ and ‘Skeleton Stomp’. We explored what sounds we could make using our bodies and our voices and made a rainstorm composition.
In S.P.H.E., we learnt that everyone is special and although we all have similarities, we also have many differences which show our uniqueness. In Religion, we continued our First Holy Communion preparation by learning about The Rosary and how Jesus healed people.
In P.E. we continued on our lessons with Coach Ed and we were delighted to start back with Coach Deirdre for gymnastics.
We hope you enjoyed our blog, tune in soon to find out how we got on in November!
