Welcome to our first blog post as Ms. Olson’s New Junior Infant Class! We are so happy to have started big school in St. Anne’s and we have all settled in well to school life. We had a fantastic first day of school meeting our new friends and our teacher – take a look!

For our first month in Junior Infants we learned about 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 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 we enjoyed playing with the farm animals in small world.

In English we have been learning our Jolly Phonics. We have enjoyed learning the songs and actions which we practise everyday. We have finished the first set of phonics and are now on to our second set. We like playing games to learn our sounds such as ‘I spy’ and ‘Hide and Seek’ with flashcards – our teacher hides sounds around the classroom which we have to find and when we find them we have to say a word that contains the sound. After we have learned a sound we colour in our Jolly Phonics book and we have stations to practise letter formation. These stations include drawing the sound in sand, making it using playdough / counters / pegboards and writing it on mini whiteboards. Once we have mastered this, we practise writing the sound in our Jolly Phonics book. We learnt lots of poems and nursery rhymes which have helped us to understand rhyming and we have read lots of stories – we especially love all the Julia Donaldson books!

In Maths we have been doing lots of counting games – forwards and backwards to ten. We like making human number lines, counting with our counting stick, listening to objects being dropped into a tin and counting the sounds and we love when the naughty fairy comes and messes up our number line for us to fix! We have learnt how to sort objects by colour, shape, size and type. We have been practising writing our numbers, making sets of specific numbers and learning about patterns.

In Gaeilge we have learned lots of songs and phrases relating to the themes Mé Féin (Myself) and Sa Bhaile (Home). We particularly like the songs ‘Tá Teidí ag siúl’ and ‘Rólaí Pólaí’. In S.E.S.E (Science, Geography and History), we learnt about ourselves, our families, our school, homes and electricity. We went on a tour of the school and mapped out our journey using shapes and bricks. In the picture below – the yellow hexagons depict classrooms, the bricks depict the corridors and the green Lego pieces depict the three yards. 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!

In Art, we drew and painted our self portraits, we made 2D shape houses and we made the The Three Little Pigs’ houses of straw, sticks and bricks. We have learned lots of songs in Music – our personal favourites are ‘Stepping Over Stepping Stones’ and ‘The Grand Old Duke of York’ as they are both marching songs. We love to start our day with a song! In Drama we explored and dramatised the story ‘A Squash and a Squeeze’ – we thought it was so funny when Ms. Olson pretended to be the Old Woman and we had to help her!

To finish off, we love doing Gymnastics on a Wednesday with Ms. Tighe and Ball Skills with Steve on a Friday. We also enjoy doing our fine motor stations every afternoon where we practise our cutting skills, writing our names and developing our hand muscles to help us when we begin writing. We hope you enjoyed reading our blog – we know its very long but we have packed so much into one short month that we had to share it all with you! Check back in with us next month to find out what we got up to in October!