December 11 2024

News from 2nd Class

We have been learning about 3D shapes and length in Maths in Ms. Olson’s class. We made cubes, cuboids and pyramids with cocktail sticks and marshmallows and we measured different things in our school including the length and width of our classroom and corridor.
We also enjoyed our last session with Coach Ian from Bar Monkey. We worked on developing our gymnastics skills by doing frog stands, bridges and hanging from the bar.
We are very creative in Second Class. In November, we learnt about Space and made lovely sponge painted planets. We have also been doing lots of Christmas art. We made snowmen, advent wreaths and Christmas tree suncatchers. Our classroom has had a Christmas makeover and we have a special visitor, our class elf, Mistletoe.
Finally we performed ‘The Night Before Christmas’ for our parents at the beginning of December and did a fantastic job. Everyone was so proud of us!
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June 29 2024

Graduation 2024

We had such a memorable and special day on Wednesday, when we said a fond farewell to our Graduating 6th classes, through stories, memories and song….we wish you every success and happiness in Secondary School!

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April 21 2024

Second Class Highlights from November to March!

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!

         

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December 4 2023

October News from Ms. Olson’s Second Class!

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!

 

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October 9 2023

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!

 

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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!

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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!

         

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.

       

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!

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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!

 

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March 8 2020

The Polar Regions in Ms. Olson’s Junior Infants!

In January, we learned all about the Polar Regions in Junior Infants. In Aistear we had lots of fun playing in both the Arctic and Antarctica home corner. We were polar explorers searching for different animals, we had to set up camp in the freezing climates and build igloos. It was lots of fun. We had fun playing with small world based in the Polar Regions and we did lots of cut and stick activities to learn about penguins and polar bears. We learned about floating and sinking and tested out different objects to see whether they floated or sank. We also worked as a group to create an Antarctica poster. We used twistables, pencils and cotton wool to create our posters and stuck pictures of different animals native to Antarctica on them.

In English we continued to learn our Jolly Phonics and we enjoyed playing phonics games. We have also been learning our tricky words and making silly sentences with them, which we read each day. We enjoyed engaging with the books – ‘The Emperor’s Egg’ by Martin Jenkins and ‘Lost and Found’ by Oliver Jeffers, both books being about penguins. We found ‘The Emperor’s Egg’ to be very informative and we learned many facts about penguins. We also started writing a book for the ‘Write a Book’ competition. We decided to write our story about a lost penguin. We all contributed a sentence to the story and then wrote it out in our neatest handwriting and drew a lovely picture to go with it.

In Gaeilge we enjoyed learning about ‘An Scoil’ (School) and ‘Caitheamh Aimsire’ (Hobbies). We liked learning about ‘Caitheamh Aimsire’ as we learned new vocabulary and sang songs and rhymes relating to toys! Toys were definitely on our minds in January straight after Christmas! In Maths we took a giant leap forward as we started learning how to partition and combine within five! We have been learning our number stories for all the ways we can make five: 0 and 5; 5 and 0; 1 and 4; 4 and 1; 2 and 3; 3; and 2. We also enjoyed learning about time and weight. We learned the days of the week; we did lots of sequencing activities, timed games, sorting items according to weight and did some heavier / lighter hunts and challenges.

In S.E.S.E, we revisited the theme of toys and we worked together in groups to design and make a toy which we then presented to the class. We learned all about Antarctica and the Arctic – we especially liked learning about penguins and polar bears. We learned about the Irish explorer, Tom Crean, who almost made it to the South Pole. We learned the names of the seven continents and we had such fun singing the continents song on YouTube.

    

In Art we made beautiful penguin and polar bear collage pictures.  In Music, we sang some lovely songs – our favourite being ‘Boa Constrictor’ which we sang for our grandparents on Grandparents’ Day. All of our grandparents thought the song was so funny as it is about being eaten by a boa constrictor! We also learned how to use body percussion to create music and using this we performed the rain song using just our hands to make the sounds!

We hoped you enjoyed our blog this month – stay tuned for February’s news!

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