February 14 2025

Rainforests

Second Class have been learning all about the rainforest. As part of our learning, we embarked on an art project, working collaboratively, to create the four layers of the rainforest – forest floor, understory, canopy and emergent layers.
We built dioramas of the rainforest using shoeboxes. Each child created their own diorama which we joined together to create the exhibit. Initially we had to work together to ensure that the trees in the shoebox above and below us lined up correctly. We used cardboard tubes to create the trees and painted the boxes. We then added different materials to create vines, flowers and leaves. We created animals relating to our layer out of clay before painting them and adding them to the boxes. Finally we stuck all the boxes together to create our rainforest!
Category: Second Class, S.E.S.E, Art | Comments Off on Rainforests
February 10 2025

Book Week

Book Week and Dress-Up as a Character from a Book 

As we get ready to celebrate Book Week this week, we are appealing for donations of books that your child may have outgrown. Spring is an ideal time to sort through and donate any used books to us, and on Friday, we hope that every child will be able to receive new books. We have collection boxes in each classroom, ready and waiting for your donations.

Across the school, we have planned a number of activities for all our pupils. Each child will be encouraged to bring in their favourite book, and also to share a photo of their favourite place to read. The highlight of our Book Week will be on Friday, when everyone is encouraged to dress up as a character from their favourite book. 

Category: Junior Infants, Senior Infants, First Class, Second Class, Third Class, Fourth Class, Fifth Class, Sixth Class, Literacy | Comments Off on Book Week
January 30 2025

Grandparents’ Day 

We just want to take a moment to say a heartfelt thank you for a wonderful Grandparents’ Day on Wednesday. The whole day was filled with joy, happiness and lots of emotions. All the Grandparents and special guests had a lovely time visiting the classrooms and spending time chatting over a cup of tea or coffee and cake in our School Hall. We also remembered all the Grandparents / guests who could not be here today through our dedicated Sacred Space. To our amazing staff, míle buíochas. Your dedication and hard work meant the day was both meaningful and memorable. An enormous thank you also to our prefects who enjoyed using their clipboards, as they escorted visitors around the school. To our wonderful PTA and parent volunteers, your support and enthusiasm added a special touch to the day. Thank you for looking after the grandparents and guests so well. Umpteen cups of tea and coffee were made!! Finally, to our incredible pupils, thank you for your super displays, classroom work and most importantly your lovely warm smiles which brightened the day for all the Grandparents and guests.

Category: Parent Teacher Association, Junior Infants, Senior Infants, First Class, Second Class, Third Class, Fourth Class, Fifth Class, Sixth Class, Religion | Comments Off on Grandparents’ Day 
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!
Category: Second Class, Maths, Art, Music, Physical Education | Comments Off on News from 2nd Class
June 28 2024

Our Final Term in Ms. Olson’s Second Class!

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!

Category: Second Class, Literacy, Maths, Gaeilge, S.E.S.E, Art, S.P.H.E, Physical Education, Religion | Comments Off on Our Final Term in Ms. Olson’s Second Class!