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!
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!

         

Category: Second Class, Literacy, Numeracy, Gaeilge, S.E.S.E, Art, Music, Drama, S.P.H.E, Physical Education, Religion | Comments Off on Second Class Highlights from November to March!
April 21 2024

STEM Challenges!

In December, our school had stem challenges where each class level had selected themes ranging from creating Christmas trees to creating sleighs. We interviewed pupils about their projects.

Junior Infants:

We interviewed Anna and Ezra. They made Christmas trees out of Lego, blocks, paper, pegs, forks, sticks and books. They made trees that were multicoloured. They were from Ms. Rigby’s class.

Senior Infants:

We interviewed Nicky and Adam. They made paper chains using cardboard and paper. Their chains were white. Nicky said his was the longest in the class. They were from Ms. McManus’s class.

First Class:

We interviewed Lucy and Ethan. They made symmetrical wrapping paper. They made Christmas trees. They painted one half of the sheet and folded it to male it symmetrical. They were from Ms. O’ Crowley’s class.

Second Class:

We interviewed Lelya and Dylan. They made Santa sleighs out of lollipop sticks, cardboard, playdough, egg cartons and cubes. They were from Mr. Higgins’ class.

  

Third Class:

We interviewed Zoe and Robyn. They made pulleys out of ribbons, wire, pom poms and cartons. They were from Ms. Dawson’s class. 

Fourth Class:

We interviewed Cara and Isabelle. They were allowed to do whatever they wanted. Cara made a wreath and Isabelle made a gingerbread house. They were from Mr. Hackett’s class.

Fifth Class:

We interviewed Isabel and Éimhin. They made elf traps out of cardboard, paper, rope, net, markers, string, clay and candy canes. They were from Ms. Treacy’s class.

Sixth Class:

We interviewed Alesha and Marcus. They could make whatever they wanted. Alesha made a cup tree and Marcus made a marshmallow launcher with Robyn. They were from Mr. Scully’s class.

 

Well done to everyone involved!

By Eoghan and Robyn

Category: Media Team, S.E.S.E | Comments Off on STEM Challenges!
April 21 2024

Environmental Workshop

Last December, Rosin from the SEAI came to our school and visited some classes to speak about the importance of saving energy. She showed us experiments like bouncing a basketball at our feet to see if we could feel the vibration. My favourite experiment was when we put a vitamin tablet in a water container with a lid. The lid popped off 4 times. The second time she put an extra half a tablet in and the lid popped off 9 times! At the end we did a quiz. Did you know that using a hair dryer for 15 minutes uses more energy than watching tv for 4 hours?

 

Thank you Roisin.

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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!

 

Category: Second Class, Literacy, Numeracy, S.E.S.E, Art, Music, S.P.H.E, Physical Education, Religion | Comments Off on October News from Ms. Olson’s Second Class!
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 on September News from Ms. Olson’s Second Class!
June 30 2023

Eggcellent News for Our Final Month in Ms. Olson’s Junior Infants!

We had a very eggciting month in June as our baby chicks were born! We incubated chicken eggs for twenty one days and they hatched into two fluffy chicks called Stardust and Sonny! 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 second 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 a week our chicks went to a lovely new home with lots of other chicken friends but every student in the school had the opportunity to visit them before they left!

 

What a year it has been in Junior Infants! We have learnt so much and are now ready to go into Senior Infants at the end of August. We ploughed full speed ahead with our literacy and we are now competent emergent readers! Everyone has made so much progress this year and it has been lovely to watch the children’s growth and development throughout the course of the year. Although the month of June symbolises the end of the year and a wind down to the holidays, we packed an awful lot of content in!

In Aistear, we loved playing in the Ice-Cream Parlour and Beach Shop Home Corner. We pretended to be the shop assistants serving delicious ice-creams and sundaes and as customers we found it so tricky to pick our ice-creams from all the mouth-watering flavours in the ice-cream fridge! We also picked up buckets and spades, swimsuits and surf boards in the beach shop! At the construction station, we enjoyed building ice-cream vans and making ice-creams out of playdough. We packed our suitcases with clothes for our holidays with a cut and stick worksheet and it was great fun heading off to the beach in small world. We loved playing with the sand and searching for magnetic letters to make words and we enjoyed making lovely ice-cream sundaes too. We also enjoyed learning about the life-cycle of a butterfly and taking the barbies swimming during water play.

   

In English, we continued to revise our Jolly Phonics and we loved the letter songs from Have Fun Teaching. We continued with our writing stations and we are now able to write our news with very little support from our teacher! Our theme for the month was ‘The Sea / Summer’ and we read a great story this month ‘Winnie at the Seaside’ by Valerie Thomas. We also enjoyed reading our own stories and we are progressing through the levels of our Oxford Reading Tree books at a great rate! If anyone would like to continue reading these over the summer, you can access them at https://www.oxfordowl.co.uk/.

In Gaeilge, we finished off Éadaí (Clothes) and Siopadóireacht (Shopping) and had lots of fun singing the songs, learning the phrases and playing the games on Bua na Cainte. In maths, we revised lots of the topics and concepts we have learnt this year including sorting, 2D and 3D shapes, pattern, number formation, more and less and addition within 5 and 10. We also learned about spatial awareness and prepositions and did a fun guided drawing activity to learn these.

We did lots of fun S.E.S.E in June! In geography we identified the signs of Summer and we learnt about the sea and some sea creatures. Most importantly we learnt about water,  and water safety. In history, we looked at how we have grown and changed in relation to what we can do now that we couldn’t do at the start of Junior Infants and when we were babies! We really enjoyed doing science experiments this month. We did a water cycle experiment and investigated our shadows outside in the yard – we made funny shapes with our bodies and drew around our shadows in chalk. We returned later on in the day to see how our shadows had changed! We learnt about the life cycle of a butterfly through story and did a cut and stick activity. We also got to see real caterpillars in their cocoons! It was really cool! We had a special planting sessions with Tanya who taught us all about minibeasts and let us take home our own wildflower bombs! We also learnt about light and heat and tested materials to see if they were waterproof or not.

        

In Art, we made lovely painted butterflies a fingerprint keepsake to remember our Junior Infants Class.

 

June was  extra special because we had Active Schools Week. We had so much fun doing lots of sports in June with a special thanks to Ms. D’Arcy for all the organisation of the activities. We had a fantastic sports day where we completed ten different activities. These were sack races, hurdles, long jump, target throws, an obstacle course, penalty shoot outs, egg and spoon races, climbing wall races, bean bag races and teddy bear relays! It was so much fun and we all got a medal at the end! We loved dancing in the lines each morning and we had two activities a day for Active Schools Week. We enjoyed yoga with Ms. Treacy, ball skills with Coach Steve, dance with Ms. Casey, ball skills with tennis balls and a game of rounders to finish off the lesson, circuit training with Ms. Hegarty and finally parachute fun!

                             

On the Friday of Active Schools Week, we had our Family Fun Day! Our parents came to see us have great fun doing some of the activities from our sports day as well as a three-legged race. We had great fun having a go at it with our parents too! We loved soaking people with sponges too and finished off the great day with a picnic and treats!

We had an absolute ball on our school tour to Tick Tock Farm despite the torrential rain! We enjoyed going on the coach and sitting beside our friends! We loved petting bunnies, exploring the school bus which was full of toys, going on all of the swings, slides and seesaws, riding around on bikes and push vehicles and of course meeting and feeding all of the lovely animals!

  

Here we are on our last day of Junior Infants – ice-creams, silly faces and all, how time has flown!

  

What a fantastic year it has been in Junior Infants! 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 lovely summer break and the very best of luck in Senior Infants!

Category: Junior Infants, Literacy, Numeracy, Gaeilge, Aistear, S.E.S.E, Art, Physical Education | Comments Off on Eggcellent News for Our Final Month in Ms. Olson’s Junior Infants!
June 29 2023

May News from Ms. Olson’s Junior Infants!

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 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 matching road signs, completing a transport paper jigsaw, sorting vehicles by air, land and sea and labelling an aeroplane. We also enjoyed creating prints with the wheels of vehicles on our tuff tray and investigating floating and sinking!

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 love reading each morning with our fifth class buddies! We are making great strides with our writing too. Monday to Thursday we do writing stations – we do one station each day. Usually our stations are: news writing; complete the sentence; sentence writing (we build the sentences with flashcards and then write them into our copies) and our handwriting book.  We are working on dictation at the moment, each morning we practise writing a few words and on Fridays we put those words together to make a sentence. We also love to do free-writing when we can write about whatever we like unaided. 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 An Aimsir (The Weather) and Éadaí (Clothes). In Maths we revised sorting and sorted shapes for up to four properties – colour, shape, size and thickness. We also did lots of addition sums within 5 and 10, practised our number formation, made sets within 10, learnt about weight and revised our 2D and 3D shapes. We also learnt about data and gathered and represented data about boys and girls in the class, eye colour, hair colour, shoe colour and favourite treats. We represented the data on pictograms. Our favourite thing was learning about spatial awareness with BeeBot, our programmable bee robot!

   

Most of our S.E.S.E learning this month was learning about our chicks as we incubated chicken eggs but we also learned about vehicles and transport and we looked at transport in the past.

 

In Art we made egg box Dublin Buses. Take a look!

  

In P.E. we enjoyed having Coach Steve from Shankill GAA for our ball skills sessions. We also did had a few more gymnastics sessions with Deirdre and we had some free play with P.E. equipment in the yard with Ms. Aivalikli’s class! We enjoyed creating our own games and we ended our session with a picnic!

 

Category: Junior Infants, Literacy, Numeracy, Gaeilge, Aistear, S.E.S.E, Art, Physical Education | Comments Off on May News from Ms. Olson’s Junior Infants!
June 1 2023

April News from Ms. Olson’s Class!

Although April was a short month with our Easter Holidays, we packed a lot in! Our theme for the month was ‘Clothes and the Weather’.

In Aistear, we enjoyed acting out the story ‘The Scarecrows’ Wedding’ by Julia Donaldson in the Farm Home Corner. We also enjoyed having the wedding breakfast and party! We made ‘jewellery’ for Betty O’Barley from the story using beads and buttons in patterns. We designed a wedding cake for Harry and Betty using shapes in patterns and we started creating our own Betty and Harry scarecrows. In week two we enjoyed our time in the weather station. We pretended to be meteorologists and we gave the weather forecast on the television for our classmates. We made beautiful cloud and rainbow mobiles and we dressed paper dolls for the correct weather with a cut and stick exercise. We enjoyed dressing baby dolls depending on the weather. We loved engaging with water play too! We had lots of bubbly water, cups, jugs, bowls, spades etc. and enjoyed filling containers and pouring the water out! We enjoyed messy play on the tuff tray with rainbow shaving foam clouds and we used playdough to make outfits for different weather conditions on paper dolls.

        

In English, we are loving being able to read independently. We read our differentiated readers when we have finished our work. We have finished our Jolly Phonics now and we spent the time revising our vowel and consonant digraphs. We are working hard at our letter formation and we are beginning to write our news independently too. We enjoyed reading and engaging with the story ‘The Smartest Giant in Town’ by Julia Donaldson and loved the kindness displayed by the Giant to people in need. 

In Gaeilge, we’ve enjoyed learning phrases, songs and poems surrounding the theme of ‘An Teilifís’ (Television). In Maths, we started learning about money. Money is a tricky topic to grasp especially in relation to the idea that a 2c or a 5c coin is more valuable than a 1c coin even though they are all single coins! To teach this concept, we start out with coin tokens instead of real coins. A coin token has dots on them to denote whether it is a 1c, 2c, or 5c coin. We played a fun exchange game whereby we exchanged 1cs for 2cs and when we had enough – for 5cs too. Once we had grasped the idea of the tokens, we used real coins to play the game. We also had great fun investigating what real coins 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 did some coin rubbings pictures, and played shop with Ms. Olson using real coins.

In S.E.S.E we finished learning about animals and the farm and made our own butter. We shook cream in a jar until it started to whip before solidifying into butter. We poured off the buttermilk, added some salt and spread it on some bread. It was very tasty! We were very lucky to go and visit the school pond to see our newts and water minibeasts too. Thanks to our caretaker, Ogie, for showing us! We also learned about the weather.

    

In Art, we  completed our farm frieze and are scarecrows that we had begun in Aistear. Take a look!

 

In P.E. we started learning how to play hurling with Coach Steve from Shankill GAA.

That’s all for now, check back in soon to see how we got on in May and June with our lovely chicks! 

Category: Junior Infants, Literacy, Numeracy, Gaeilge, Aistear, S.E.S.E, Art, Physical Education | Comments Off on April News from Ms. Olson’s Class!