Wow! 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 boat pictures. Finally we worked as a group to make a beautiful beach scene!

In English, we continued to revise our Jolly Phonics, we learnt about the magic ‘e’ and we loved singing along to Jack Hartmann’s word family songs on YouTube as well as the letter songs from Have Fun Teaching. We continued with our writing stations and worked really hard at our free-writing this month. 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 so many great stories this month including ‘Commotion in the Ocean’ by Giles Andreae, ‘Winnie at the Seaside’ by Valerie Thomas, ‘The Rainbow Fish’ by Marcus Pfister and ‘Tiddler’ by Julia Donaldson. 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), ‘An Teilifís (Television) 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 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 went on a summer nature walk. We also enjoyed going on a minibeasts hunt with our magnifying glasses! We learnt about the sea and some sea creatures. However, 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 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 and we brought our sunflowers home  – look at the size at them! Finally, we got a lovely update on our chicks – look how they’ve grown!

June was a great month for making crafts! We made lovely painted butterflies, jellyfish mobiles, Father’s Day cards and a fingerprint keepsake to remember our Junior Infants Class. In Music, we sang lots of songs and listening to some classic pieces of music to identify their moods and tempo.

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. Woods for all the organisation of the activities. We had a fantastic sports day where we completed eight different activities. These were sack races, hurdles, long jump, target throws, an obstacle course, penalty shoot outs, egg and spoon 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. On Monday we loved doing an obstacle course with Ms. Aivalikli followed by dance with Ms. Casey. On Tuesday, we did gymnastics and ball skills with tennis balls. We put our skills to the test with a game of rounders to finish off the lesson. On Wednesday, we had an assault course with Mr. Ryan and circuit training with Ms. Hegarty. On Thursday, we had fun with skipping ropes, scooter boards and skip ball in the morning followed by parachute fun! Finally on Friday we enjoyed ball skills with Coach Steve and yoga with Ms. Treacy.

We also had three great events in the school – a toy swap organised by sixth class, our Family Fun Day and an intercultural Zoom exchange with an Italian school – Baby College Seregno! We had three zooms with our Italian friends over the month of June learning about the things that they like and we loved telling them our news about Active Schools Week and where we were going on our holidays. Two fantastic days and a lovely experience! Thanks to all involved!

We had an absolute ball on our school tour to Tick Tock Farm. We enjoyed going on the coach and sitting beside our friends! We loved pushing bunnies around in trolleys, exploring the school bus which was full of toys, going on all of the swings, slides and see-saws, 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!