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!

Category: Second Class, Literacy, Numeracy, Gaeilge, S.E.S.E, Art, Music, Drama, S.P.H.E, Physical Education, Religion | Comments Off

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!

Category: Second Class, Literacy, Numeracy, S.E.S.E, Art, Music, S.P.H.E, Physical Education, Religion | Comments Off

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!

Category: Second Class, Literacy, Numeracy, S.E.S.E, Art, Music, Drama, S.P.H.E, Physical Education, Religion | Comments Off

March 1 2023

Service of Light

All three 6th Classes recently had their Service of Light. Emily Lowe in 6th Class has written this piece about all the preparation that went into it!

On the second of February, St. Anne’s Sixth Class, along with a handful of students from other schools, celebrated our Ceremony of Light. The Ceremony of Light is an important Catholic event, as it focuses on our parents sharing their light of faith with us. This is a key step in preparing for our Confirmation.

To prepare for our Ceremony of Light, Ms. Maguire and Ms. Elmes asked students to participate in the choir. A few students from each of the three Sixth Classes volunteered, and choir rehearsals were held to practice our hymns. Our Sixth Class teachers, our Sixth Class SNA, and Father Jamie helped us greatly to prepare for this celebration, and I think I speak for everyone when I say their faith inspired us every step of the way.

At seven o’clock in the evening, we all gathered in St. Anne’s Church. Every family had a Holy Candle that would be passed from parent to child toward the end of the ceremony. Once everyone was seated, the members of the choir began with the opening hymn: “Shine, Jesus, Shine.” When the hymn was over, we returned to our seats in the pews, and the ceremony began. Father Jamie gave a speech about a scene in The Lion King and linked it to God speaking to us, his sons and daughters. The teachers came around and lit our Holy Candles, and then the time came for our parents to pass the candle of faith to us. The choir sang the closing hymn: “This Little Light of Mine,” and the ceremony came to an end!

By Emily M. Lowe

Category: Sixth Class, Media Team, Religion | Comments Off

February 13 2022

January News from Ms. Treacy’s Fifth Class!

We had a great start to the New Year in Room 17 – check out what we’ve been up to across the month of January…

In Literacy, we studied a Chapter of C.S Lewis’ ‘The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe’ as a focus for our narrative writing. We were inspired to write some ‘magical doorway’ themed stories ourselves in school and some wonderful short stories for the ‘Write a Book’ competition also – many budding authors showcasing their creativity. In addition, we have been studying persuasive writing this month. We really enjoyed brainstorming and debating a range of topics from gaming to homework and many more – excellent arguments on show with great rebuttal to see!

As Gaeilge, bhíomar ag díriú ar na téamaí ‘Siopadóireacht’ agus ‘Mé Féin’. Bhíomar ag cleachtadh foclóir bainteach le na cineálacha siopaí atá ar fáil, cad is féidir a cheannach iontu agus conas cur síos a thabhairt ar an gcostas atá ar rudaí. Bhíomar ag déanamh dul siar ar chomhráití bainteach le cur síos a thabhairt fút féin, faoi codanna an chorp agus na postanna a mbeidh againn nuair atáimid fásta aníos. Ó thaobh na gramadaí de, rinneamar obair ar na briathra neamhrialta san Aimsir Fháistineach chomh maith le obair ar an Aidiacht Shealbhach.

In maths, we have been focusing on percentages – a very useful real-life topic. We have been learning to calculate percentages of numbers, including percentage increases and decreases. We also focused on the measures strand with some weight and capacity work – revising how to change units, add, subtract, multiply and divide different weights/capacities.

In History, we studied ‘The American Revolution’ and ‘The French Revolution’. We used the iPads to research some of the key events and read some comprehensions to delve a little further into these revolutionary times.

In Science, we focused on the theme of ‘sound’. We learned about the structure of the ear and the different functions of these parts. We also completed some experiments to show how sound travels as vibrations. We even made our own straw flutes to illustrate our work on pitch.

In Geography, we studied the different climate zones of the world, using our atlases to help us locate what climate zones related to certain locations around the world. We also learned about the latitudinal and longitudinal lines around the globe that help us to identify locations around the world and how they are linked to the climate zones and the time zones.

In Art, we drew some lovely hot chocolate inspired mugs to heat us up on these cold January days. We also studied the artist James Rizzi and used his artwork as inspiration for our own cartoon inspired cityscapes.

In Music, we studied the history of ‘hip-hop’ and practiced some rapping. We also enjoyed some rhythm and performing work on DabbleDoo. We learned two new songs as Gaeilge as well – ‘Can’t Stop The Feeling’ by Justin Timberlake and ‘A Sky Full of Stars’ by Coldplay.

In PE, we concluded our cycling course which we really enjoyed and will hope to reap the practical benefits of over time. We also have been focusing on team games like football and Olympic handball to extend our ball skills and teamwork ability.

In SPHE, we have started the ‘Stay Safe’ programme and we focused on the topic of ‘Feeling Safe and Unsafe’. Lots of practical discussion and scenario work extending our decision making.

We also really enjoyed getting to grips with some more coding using Scratch with Ms. Aivaliki. She introduced us to some of the basics of the coding world using this great resource – a really enjoyable afternoon had by all!

We also celebrated ‘Grandparents Day’ as part of ‘Catholic Schools Week’ – although they couldn’t be present this year, we were reminded of the memories we share and the love they give us.

Thanks for reading!

Category: Fifth Class, Literacy, Numeracy, S.E.S.E, Art, S.P.H.E, Physical Education, Religion | Comments Off

June 11 2018

Alison’s Shop!

Hello! My name is Pranav and I write for the St. Anne’s Media Team.

My story is about Alison’s Shop. Alison’s shop was a place where you could get stationary. You could get cool pencils, rulers and much more. The shop started in Ms. Travers’ class and in two weeks everyone knew about it. Without Noreen, Alison and Ms Travers the shop wouldn’t have existed.

In a month it became a trend. All the money went to Trócaire and again it was thanks to Noreen, Alison and Ms. Travers. We raised €420. Fifth class also raised money for Trócaire. As a result, we were able to give Trócaire a large cheque that will support people to live with dignity and independence in some of the world’s poorest countries.

Category: Fourth Class, Media Team, Religion | Comments Off

May 9 2018

Sixth Class Confirmation

On the 14^th of April, the two 6^th classes (Ms. Kett’s and Ms. Aivalikli’s) officially made their Confirmation.

A few weeks prior, they had the Service of Light, in which their parents handed their baptismal candle to them, passing on the light of guidance in the next step of Christianity.

Then they had rehearsals for the big day. They had confession and lots of preparation. Many people had prayers and readings to prepare.

On the day, they all wore robes/albs, which the teachers put pins on, saying their Confirmation names. That morning everyone was bubbling with excitement. The ceremony in St. Anne’s Church was beautiful. The 5^th class sang many lovely songs too. Bernie and others from the parish did a great job helping them prepare for the occasion. St. Anne’s church was filled with artwork from the 6^th classes.

The parents, teachers and children were beautifully dressed in shirts and dresses. We would like to thank our priests: Monsignor Enda Lloyd, Father Jamie and Father John. We would also like to thank our photographer John Coveney. At the end of the ceremony we got class photos. We all then went back to the school for a party. We all had great fun.

After the school party many of the children went to a hotel with friends and family for a meal.

We would like to thank our teachers and principal, all the people working with the church and our parents and friends for a lovely day, thank you very much.

Written by Eoin and Kate, Media Team

Category: Sixth Class, Media Team, Religion | Comments Off