March 16 2019

News from Ms. Rigby’s First Class!

We’ve once again had a busy few weeks in room 3. We had the most wonderful day for Grandparents day. We enjoyed performing and also asking loads of questions. We also performed at assembly. Our performance was all about the extra homework we were given. We weren’t too impressed when Ms Rigby gave us extra homework. The extra homework was to smile a little bit more.

We’ve also started group work projects. We found it a little tricky at first but we are getting much better. We have been working together to make presentations on different dinosaurs for the whole class. We’ll show you them when they are done.
We also had a great week for world book day.  We were lucky enough to have Mr Fingleton read to us! We thought the books were very funny!
  
Category: First Class, Literacy, S.E.S.E | Comments Off on News from Ms. Rigby’s First Class!
March 14 2019

News from Ms. Black’s Junior Infants!

This month we learned about Polar bears and other arctic animals, we did very cool artwork.
  
We were learning all about the weather and we kept a weather journal for a week to record the different types of weather each day. We learned lots about aimsir in gaeilge. We made great symbols of sunshine, cloud, rain, snow and wind for our weather forecast corner. We took turns to forecast the weather all over Ireland.
In maths we are learning the story of 5 and we did a survey on eye colour in our class and showed the results on a pictogram.
Daily reading has started and we are really excited to read a different book everyday.
Category: Junior Infants, Aistear, S.E.S.E, Art | Comments Off on News from Ms. Black’s Junior Infants!
March 14 2019

News from Ms. Woods’ Junior Infants!

This month we went to the polar regions with our Aistear.

We made penguins and polar bears and had great fun finding out about Tom Crean and all his adventures in Antartica.

  

We set up camp and went fishing in the arctic and followed Tom Crean’s example and went to explore the South pole. We looked at the emperor penguin and were amazed to see that the male penguin minds the eggs.

  

We spent a lot of time learning our jolly phonics sounds and are now able to blend them to form words. We are learning the story of five in Maths.We sang, did poetry and lots of irish.We had a great time!
 
Category: Junior Infants, Aistear, S.E.S.E, Art | Comments Off on News from Ms. Woods’ Junior Infants!
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 on Back to School with a Bang in Senior Infants!
January 20 2019

Time Well Spent in Mr. Dunne’s Third Class!

Mr. Dunne’s third class kicked off the New Year with a bang! We’ve been doing loads of really interesting things in class so far this year. Here’s a few examples!

We’ve been learning about time and how to tell the time. We decided to make our own clocks using paper plates and a lot of hard work! They work really well, and we’re finding them really helpful in class. Not to mention, we got to add our own designs to them to personalise them. You can tell we spent a lot of time on them… but, after all, hard work takes time!              

   

   

 

We’ve also been learning about the food pyramid and the five food groups – carbohydrates, fruit and vegetables, dairy, protein and fats. We’ve been looking at what’s in our lunches and what we’re eating at home. We created menus that contained all of the five food groups! We also looked at the amount of sugar in different kinds of drinks. You can see in the picture below the amount of sugar in flavoured water, Sprite, a smoothie (although this is the good, natural kind of sugar!), a Monster energy drink and a bottle of Coke. We were all really surprised at some of them!!

That’s all for now, we’ll check back in again soon!

Category: Third Class, Maths, S.E.S.E | Comments Off on Time Well Spent in Mr. Dunne’s Third Class!
January 20 2019

News from Ms. Black’s Class!

We had a very busy, exciting month in December. We made lots of colourful Christmas decorations. We learned how busy the post office is at Christmas time and we designed our own Christmas cards. We worked hard at learning our lines, songs and dances for our Christmas play. We looked very cute in our costumes and enjoyed performing for our families and the school.
        
        
Back at school now, we have been busy learning about Antarctica. We made cute penguins and learned many interesting facts about emperor penguins.  We heard about Tom Crean the heroic Irish Antarctic explorer and we designed our own boats. We were experimenting with lots of different item to see what floats and sinks. In reading we are practising tricky words and writing three letter words ourselves.
        
                                               
We have dance classes with Ms. Casey on Tuesdays and PE on Wednesdays. Next week we are looking at polar bears and other arctic animals.

 

Category: Junior Infants, Aistear, S.E.S.E, Art | Comments Off on News from Ms. Black’s Class!
January 14 2019

Ms. Kelly’s Class Project!

This year in Ms Kelly’s class we have done a lot. We will be doing projects throughout the year. Our first project was on bridges. There were so many things we could do using bridges as a topic. We could make model of bridges, write about bridges or draw pictures of bridges.  Most people decided to make a model of a bridge. However, some people chose to write about bridges too. We had about 20 days to get it done. Most people who made models used tall lollipop sticks. One bridge was made out of straws. Another person made a project out of clay. There was also a project made of wood and nails. In assembly, our class did a presentation on Bridges. Everybody had to read 1 fact about Bridges. Then, we sang the song ‘A Bridge over troubled water.’

Written by the Creative Media Team

Category: Fifth Class, Media Team, S.E.S.E, Music | Comments Off on Ms. Kelly’s Class Project!
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 on A Winter Wonderland in Senior Infants!
January 14 2019

First Class – Ms McManus

After a really lovely break, we’ve started to settle down in first class after a crazy and fun lead up to Christmas! One of the first things we did as a class, was discuss New Year’s Resolutions. We brainstormed some ideas that we knew we could stick to for the whole year, and everyone chose one to write up as a reminder. We’ll let you know how they’re going throughout the year!

 

Our New Years Resolutions

Just before the break, we learned all about Christopher Columbus and his explorations. We learned about his life as a trader and chatted about how difficult life would have been as an explorer, before the invention of airplanes! Once we felt we knew enough about Columbus, we created fact files so that other people in our class could come and learn about him too!

 

Christopher Columbus Display Board

 

Our first art lesson of the year focused on a printing technique called ‘pointilism’. We used cotton buds to fill outlines of our favourite toys with colour. It took a long time and the boys and girls had to be very patient, but I think the hard work paid off!

 

Pointilism Examples:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Category: First Class, S.E.S.E, Geography, Art | Comments Off on First Class – Ms McManus
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 on Paleontologists at work in Ms Hughes’ Class