We had another busy month in Junior Infants! Our theme for February was Homes and Houses. In Aistear we had great fun doing lots of different activities each week. In the socio-dramatic play corner, we enjoyed playing in the kitchen making dinner; acting out the different parts in ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’ and pretending to be the Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf! We did lots of construction activities such as playing with Lego, Duplo, Stickle Bricks and Straws – we made things like houses for the Three Little Pigs, our own dream houses and different sized furniture for Goldilocks and the Three Bears. We enjoyed playing with playdough – we made furniture for houses; bricks, sticks and straws for the Three Little Pigs’ houses and different sized bowls of porridge for Goldilocks. We also practised our cutting and sticking skills whilst sequencing the stories of Goldilocks and the Three Little Pigs and designing our own houses. We also enjoyed acting out the stories in the puppet theatre and with the doll’s house in small world.

In English we continued to learn our Jolly Phonics and Tricky Words and we enjoyed playing phonics games. We enjoyed engaging with the book – ‘A Squash and a Squeeze’ by Julia Donaldson and we started reading our own differentiated readers! We are loving using our blending skills to decipher all the words in the book and we are making such progress. We participated in the ‘Write a Book’ competition and produced a fantastic book about a little polar bear cub called Fluffy and her friend, a snowy owl, called Snowy. We worked on our storytelling skills first through playing with Rory Story Cubes and then each person in our class suggested a sentence for our story. We worked really hard on the writing and pictures and sent it off to be judged. Fingers crossed!

In Gaeilge we enjoyed learning about ‘Sa Bhaile’ (At Home). We liked learning one song in particular ‘Dhá Éan Bheaga’ as it is the Gaeilge version of ‘Two Little Birdies Sitting in a Tree’! In Maths we followed on from partitioning and combining within five and learnt the number stories for four! We also enjoyed learning about capacity. We used the story of ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’ to investigate the how much each bears’ porridge bowl could hold. We also had a popcorn party for Goldilocks and had to decide which container would be the most suitable for holding the popcorn! We enjoyed eating the popcorn too! We also celebrated Pancake Tuesday in Junior Infants and enjoyed sequencing how to make a pancake before eating our own! Yum!

In S.E.S.E (Science, Geography and History), we learnt about  homes, magnets and electricity. We learnt about the different rooms in homes, things you might find in those rooms and activities that happen there. We looked at homes in the past and we did a class poll to see what type of home everyone lived in. We learned about electricity and we investigated making static electricity. We managed to make our hair stand up, we attached a balloon to a wall, we picked up pieces of paper using a balloon and we bent water in the tap using a balloon! We also had lots of fun exploring with magnets. We investigated a range of materials to see if they were magnetic and moved iron filings around a dish!

In P.E. we focused on the Games strand of the curriculum. We love playing our warm up games and then practising dribbling with unihoc sticks. We also worked on passing the ball to our partner, striking the ball into a goal, doing dribbling relays and we finished up the Games strand with a game of hockey!

In Art, we made lovely ‘I Love You to the Moon and Back’ Valentine’s Day cards for our parents. We also drew and painted our dream houses. In Music we learnt lots of songs about Teddy Bears including ‘I have a Small Teddy’; ‘Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear’; ‘The Three Bears’ and Tá Teidí Agamsa’.

We hope you enjoyed our blog, tune in next month to hear what we got up to!