February News from Ms. Olson’s Class!

In February we learnt all about animals. We had great fun playing in our Veterinary Surgery role play corner during Aistear time. In English, we read the story, Farmer Duck, written by Martin Waddell and we practised our summarising and sequencing skills. We loved reading this story as it was very funny!

In Maths, we learnt about weight. We had lots of fun sorting different objects according to weight and playing and measuring with balances. We even got to bake some tasty buns!

In Gaeilge we learnt lots of phrases and songs relating to the themes of Éadaí (Clothes) and ‘Sa Bhaile’ (Home). In S.E.S.E we learnt about farmers and vets, animals and their young and how to care for our pets. We also did some report writing on ‘Our Pets’.

In Drama, we read the story ‘Cleopatra Silverwing’ by Adria Meserve. This story follows the life of a beautiful butterfly who loves doing cherry dip flips and loop-the-loops! One day she decides to go on an adventure instead of doing what she’s told – a storm is brewing and she is told it’s time to head home. We pretended to be Cleopatra doing her stunts and we came up with solutions to her problems that she faced on her adventure. In Music, we sang some lovely songs related to our animal theme – ‘Who Built the Ark?’ and ‘Please Mr. Noah’. In Art we made some cute little piggies out of cardboard tubes to celebrate Chinese New Year and we made animals out of clay!

Finally in P.E we learnt a dance to the Lion King’s ‘I just can’t wait to be King’. We did dance lessons with Ms. Casey for six weeks and at the end, we performed this dance for all the children at Junior Assembly. You can check out our dance on Twitter @MsOlsonsClass.

Category: Senior Infants, Literacy, Maths, Gaeilge, Aistear, S.E.S.E, Art, Music, Drama, Physical Education | Comments Off

April 3 2019

News from Ms Livingston’s Class

Welcome to Ms. Livingston’s Senior Infants. This month, our Aistear theme was People who help us. We learned all about people in our community such as firefighters, doctors, nurses, dentists, lollipop ladies, paramedics, lifeguards and more! We performed two poems at junior assembly, one about how firemen help us and another about the gardaí.

We all dressed up in our Irish colours for St. Patrick’s Day! We looked at the St. Patrick’s Day parade and also how other countries celebrate it around the world.

We went on a Spring nature walk around the school grounds. We recorded any signs of spring. We found a lot of daffodils. We also saw lots of different flowers which some classes had planted in Senior Yard. We used our five senses while on our walk. We could smell lavender from the school garden. We also could hear birds chirping.

We also planted our very own seeds from the Incredible edible programme. We first planted the seeds in small containers in our class. Some of the food we planted were turnips, lettuce, carrots, potatoes, strawberries, and chives. When they started to sprout in the pots, we moved them and planted them in the garden. We hope to see them grow even more!

Category: Senior Infants, Aistear, S.E.S.E, Geography, Science | Comments Off

April 1 2019

Senior Infant Science Trip!

In March, the three senior infant classes went on an outing to Explorium. Explorium is the new Science and Sports centre in Sandyford. We travelled by bus and arrived at Ten O’ Clock. We spent two hours freely exploring the exhibits. There were areas where we could play in a pretend shop or dress up and put on a show on a stage! There was a sensory room where our drawings came to life on a giant screen. There was also kinetic energy and musical exhibits exploring the science behind sound. Of course, a popular feature of the day was the indoor adventure course which included a net climbing frame and slide. We really enjoyed our day out!

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March 11 2019

Back to School with a Bang in Senior Infants!

January was an interesting month in Senior Infants because we learnt all about Egypt! We had lots of fun during Aistear time. We enjoyed playing in the Airport Role Play corner where we pretended to be going on our holidays to Egypt. We liked building pyramids out of Lego. We pretended to be archaeologists digging for buried treasure during sand play and we worked as a team to create cool mummies and sarcophaguses.

In English, we spent a lot of time on narrative writing as we entered the Write a Book Project. Our book was about a little boy and a little girl called John and Jojo. They went on a school tour to an Egyptian museum and managed to travel back in time to have a scary encounter with a mummy! It all turned out ok in the end though!

In Gaeilge, we learned many songs and phrases around the topics of Bia (food) and Éadaí (Clothes). We loved playing little language games using picture cards in pairs because we were able to talk to our friends using the simple phrases that we’d learnt. In Maths we revised pattern and data. We made lots of different patterns using shapes, camels, pegboards and unifi cubes. We did a survey of our class to investigate what everyone’s favourite toy was and then we recorded the data by making bar charts.

In S.E.S.E we learnt all about Egypt. We learned about Egypt’s landscape, rivers, mountains and cities. We learnt about Egyptian food and animals that you might find in Egypt such as camels, cheetahs, crocodiles, hyenas and cobras. Then we learnt about Egyptian pharaohs such as Tutankhamun and Cleopatra and about pyramids and mummies. We found it all very fascinating!

In Art, we wrote our names in Egyptian hieroglyphs and we made pharaoh pictures using our photographs. We also made Egyptian golden necklaces using dyed pasta! They all turned out really well!

In Music we’ve been learning lots of songs as we always start our day with a song. We particularly enjoyed learning the song ‘Over in the Meadow’ and we loved performing it for our Grandparents on Grandparent’s Day. In Drama, we read the story ‘The Girl with the Red Slippers’ which is an Egyptian version of Cinderella. We had great fun pretending to be ballerinas and acting out the different parts in the story. Finally, we have been doing dance in P.E with Catherine Casey and we learnt a dance from the Lion King. You can check it out on our twitter page – @MsOlsonsClass

Category: Senior Infants, Literacy, Numeracy, Gaeilge, Aistear, S.E.S.E, Art, Drama, Physical Education | Comments Off

January 14 2019

A Winter Wonderland in Senior Infants!

Happy New Year from all of us here in Ms. Olson’s Senior Infants. We can’t believe it is 2019 and we are into our fifth month of school! Time flies when you’re having fun!

In December we explored the theme of Christmas and Wintertime and we really enjoyed ourselves! In Aistear, we loved playing in the Post Office / Santa’s workshop. We had to write letters to Santa, post them in the post box and wait for the elves to design, make and wrap our presents before Santa delivered them to us! At another station we baked chocolate chip cookies for Santa (although we may or may not have eaten them ourselves hehe…)

In Literacy, we read the stories ‘Bear Snores On’ by Karma Wilson and ‘One Snowy Night’ by Nick Buttersworth. Both stories were set in wintertime and the main characters were animals. We also spent some time learning how to write letters. We even drafted our own letters to Santa Claus before copying out the finished piece on to a lovely Santa letter template. Our handwriting was so neat that Ms. Olson displayed them on our classroom wall! In Gaeilge, we learned lots of phrases and new vocabulary surrounding the theme of ‘An Nollaig’. We learnt the songs ‘Bualadh Bos’ and ‘Seo í an Leanbh Íosa’ which are versions of Jingle Bells and Away in a Manger. In Maths we learned about 3D shapes – cube, cuboid, sphere and cylinder. We liked going on shape walks, playing with our 3D Beebot shape mat and making 3D shapes out of marshmallows and cocktail sticks!

In S.E.S.E we learned about the different animals that hibernate and migrate in winter. We also sequenced the story of Christmas and we had great fun learning about materials – in groups we designed toys and we made them out of materials that we could find in the classroom. We then presented our toys to the rest of the class. We also made snow by adding water to polysodium acrylate (the stuff inside nappies!!) in Science!

We made some lovely things in Art last month! We made Christmas elves using our faces, winter penguins, Christmas tree decorations, stain glass nativity scenes and nice Christmas cards for our families. We were very lucky to be able to perform some songs at assembly in Decemeber. We sang an extended version of Jingle Bells and Santa Shark. All the other children loved our performance and even sang along! We also performed our Christmas play ‘What a Star!’ for the school and our parents. We did a fantastic job and Ms. Olson and our parents were so proud of us! We really are superstars in Senior Infants!

Thank you for taking the time to read our blog. We hope you liked it! Our next blog is sure to be an interesting read as we are currently learning about Egypt! Check it out next month – in the meantime keep track of what we are doing by following us on twitter – @MsOlsonsClass!

Category: Senior Infants, Literacy, Maths, Aistear, S.E.S.E, Art | Comments Off

January 10 2019

Paleontologists at work in Ms Hughes’ Class

Lots of exciting things have happened in Senior Infants since our last post. We had an exciting November. Science Week inspired our theme ‘Dinosaurs’. We worked as scientists excavating fossils from our Paleontology sand pit dig. We used our chisels and brushes to uncover fossils and then we recorded our findings on our clip board chart- serious business!

We made our own salt dough ‘fossils’ by imprinting shells and toy dinosaurs into the dough. In art we created dinosaurs bone pictures. Deva also built us an amazing Volcano so we could really go back to a prehistoric world during role play time. We have learnt the different names and characteristics of lots of dinosaurs and we have even done ‘The Dino Stomp’ dance

We really enjoyed our dance classes with Ms Casey and we also wowed the parents and teachers in our performance of ‘A Christmas Toy Story’. We are a talented bunch and can’t wait to see what learning and fun term two brings.

Category: Senior Infants, Aistear, S.E.S.E, Art, Drama | Comments Off

December 16 2018

“You’re Under Arrest”…..in Ms. Olson’s Senior Infants!

Our theme for the month of November was ‘Jobs’ and what an interesting month it was! In Aistear, we had a Garda Station role play corner which we really loved! We had to answer all the 999 calls and dispatch the guards to different situations. We had a Garda car to take us to those emergencies and we even had a cell to hold the prisoners! We also had to fill out incident forms and take finger-prints. It was a lot of fun!

We also made Emergency Services puppets in Aistear. We made Guards, Mountain Rescuers, Paramedics and Firefighters. Take a look at our creations!

In Literacy we read and did lots of work on two different stories related to our theme – ‘Lost and Found’ by Oliver Jeffers and ‘The Little Red Hen’ by Michael Foreman. These stories show how people help us. In ‘Lost and Found’ the little boy helps the penguin find his way home and in ‘The Little Red Hen’, the hen makes new friends who help her to make bread. We spent a lot of time developing our comprehension skills such as predicting, questioning and summarising when reading these stories, as well as analysing and dramatizing the feelings of the characters. We also wrote a of list of things we thought the little boy and the penguin might need on their trip to the South Pole!

In S.E.S.E we learnt all about jobs. We realised that there are so many different jobs that people do in the world and we had a think about what we would like to be when we grow up. We also learnt about the Emergency Services and the different work that they do. Probably the most interesting part of our month was when we devised questions to interview our parents about their jobs. We practised our interviewing skills in school beforehand by conducting mock interviews in pairs and then we interviewed our parents for homework. We loved hearing about the work that our parents do and we want to say a big thank you to our parents for letting us interview them!

In Music, we learnt lots of songs surrounding our theme such as ‘What shall we do in our work today?’ and ‘Harry was a fireman’. In Art, we made Emergency Services vehicles out of egg carton boxes. Take a look!

Finally we were busy preparing for our Christmas play – ‘What a Star!’ which we performed for our parents in early December. We did a fantastic job and everyone was so proud of us! Here’s a sneak peek of some of the pictures from our dress rehearsal. More to follow on our next blog post! Thanks for reading!

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November 11 2018

3…2…1…BLAST OFF!

During the month of October we learned all about Space! In English we read the story ‘Whatever Next!’ by Jill Murphy. In this story, Baby Bear finds a space rocket in the cupboard under the stairs. He finds a space helmet and space boots in the kitchen and then he zooms up the chimney and lands on the moon, all before bedtime! Whilst reading this story, we practised our comprehension skills of predicting, visualising, questioning and summarising, we learned new vocabulary, wrote a list of things that Baby Bear would need to bring with him to have a picnic and even dramatized Baby Bear zooming up the chimney in his box rocket!

In Maths, we continued to partition and combine for 6 but we also learned all about 2D shapes – squares, rectangles, triangles, circles, ovals and hexagons. We enjoyed going on 2D shape hunts around the school, playing guessing games with the shapes, drawing pictures using 2D shapes, playing with tangrams, using BeeBots to find 2D shapes and constructing 2D shapes out of cocktail sticks and marshmallows. In Gaeilge we learned lots of songs and phrases surrounding the theme of ‘An Scoil’ and of course ‘Oíche Shamhna’.

In History, we learned all about Neil Armstrong and created a timeline of his life. In Geography we learned all about our Solar System. We came up with a great mnemonic to remember the names and order of the planets – My Very Excited Mother Just Served Us Noodles – Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. We even pretended to be the planets orbiting around the sun! In Science we learned all about rockets and how they blast off into space. We made our own balloon rockets and launched them along a string.

In Music we learned lots of songs for Halloween but we also had to prepare for our assembly performance. We learned a song that retold the story of ‘Whatever Next!’ that we had been learning in English. We performed it at assembly to all of Junior Infants, Senior Infants and First Class! We did a fantastic job! In Drama, we played some fun drama games and read the story ‘The Way Back Home’ by Oliver Jeffers. The little boy in the story crash lands on the moon and befriends a Martian. Together we had to come up with a solution to help the boy and the Martian find their way back home! This month, we are busy preparing for our Christmas play, we are very excited to perform it in front of all our families.

In Art, we made some fantastic space rockets made out of plastic bottles and papier mâché. We also made some puffy paint planets. We had great fun making the puffy paint out of shaving foam, PVA glue and paint! Finally to talk about our favourite time of the day… Aistear! We loved playing in our space centre role play corner this month. We had to do all our safety checks before counting down and blasting off into space. We then had to put on our space suits and walk around the moon! We hope you enjoyed reading our blog post. Check back in a month’s time to find out what we have been up to in November and follow us on twitter @MsOlsonsClass to keep track in the mean time!

Category: Senior Infants, Literacy, Maths, Aistear, S.E.S.E, Art, Music | Comments Off

October 29 2018

Ms Livingston’s Senior Infants

Welcome to Ms. Livingston’s Senior infants. This month, our Aistear theme was The Vet. We learned all about how the Vet is very important in our community and what they do to help our pets. Each day we play at a different station which is based on our theme.

We made our own bread. We measured how much of each ingredient we would need. We put it in the oven to bake. It tasted delicious! We even got to take home a slice for someone at home to try.

We went on an Autumn Nature walk around the school grounds. We used a checklist and clipboards to record what exactly we saw. Some of the items we collected were conkers, leaves and pinecones. We brought some of them back into our class to put on our nature table. Then we wrote about what we saw, what we heard, what we smelled and how we felt when we were on out Autumn walk!

We also had a exciting last day before midterm, we dressed up in our Halloween costumes and bought lots of cakes in the cake sale!

Category: Senior Infants, Numeracy, Aistear, Art | Comments Off

October 17 2018

News from Ms Hughes senior infants class.

Our class has had a great start to the school year. I am so impressed with this group of kind and hard working Senior Infants. In fact these guys are so kind that our class ‘Kindness Cape’ is getting worn out from all the wear it’s getting!

Much of our learning has centered around our ‘Aistear’ play themes On The Farm and The Vet. Each day we play with a different play centre related to our theme. It’s great fun and we are getting really good at planning our play and tidying up afterwards.

We are very active in school with weekly Ball Skills and Gymnastics and we also love our in class ‘Gonoodle’ and ‘Cosmic Kids Yoga’! Physical activity is important as our brains need a break after all of the hard work in class.

We have recited lots of funny poems, become weather reporters, gone on a nature walk and baked apple crumble. This week we started to make some Halloween art. We are looking forward to seeing what learning and fun the rest of term brings!

Category: Senior Infants, Physical Education | Comments Off