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. Finally, we loved engaging with water play! We had lots of bubbly water, cups, jugs, bowls, spades etc. and enjoyed filling containers and pouring the water out!

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. We had a lovely time dressing up as our favourite characters and bringing in our favourite books for Book Week. We went to the Book Fair and were able to get some new books. There was also a competition for the best costumes – won by Dogman and Little Red Riding Hood!

In Gaeilge, we’ve enjoyed learning phrases, songs and poems surrounding the theme of ‘An Aimsir’ (The Weather). 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 too. Thanks to our caretaker, Ogie, for showing us! We also learned about the weather and the water cycle. We enjoyed learning about different types of precipitation and investigated the different states of water – solid, liquid and gas.

In Art, we farm animals using paper plates and Easter cards for our families. We created a nest of eggs using potato stamps and decorated the eggs with little gems. We made finger print Easter Bunny silhouettes as well. We also completed our scarecrows that we had begun in Aistear. Take a look!

In Music, we continued to start our day with a song and we particularly liked the song ‘Cúig Ubh’ and ‘Jig-a-Jog Jig’! In S.P.H.E we completed the Stay Safe Programme and in P.E., we finished our dance sessions with Catherine Casey School of Dance and enjoyed learning our fundamental skills with Coach Ed. We also started doing gymnastics with our teacher. After our warm up, we do four gymnastics stations working on our jumping, hopping, rolling and cartwheel skills. We love doing ‘Jelly Belly’ as a cool down too!

On our last day of term, we had a lovely Easter egg hunt and we enjoyed colouring Easter pictures!

That’s all for now, check back in soon to see how we got on in May with our lovely chicks! Here’s a sneak peek!