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!