Welcome to Ms. Olson’s Junior Infant Blog. Wow, we had a very busy September but we are settling in so well to big school and we have been having so much fun! Our first day was a bit different to other years but our parents and our teacher were so proud of us walking into school all by ourselves! We had lots of fun meeting our new friends and playing with all the toys in our classroom. Take a look at these photos of our first day in Junior Infants!

In September, we were learning all about ourselves and the doctor. Every morning we do Aistear, which is structured playtime. There are four stations per week and we play at one station each day. We love playing in the home corner. This month, we enjoyed playing in ‘The Doctors’ Surgery’, ‘The Toys’ Hospital’ and ‘The Opticians’. We were given a role to play and had to act out the part that we were given. We also enjoyed playing in small world. In small world, we had to set up a town and act out different scenarios using wooden people. Some of the scenarios included going to the doctors and the opticians. Another station that we enjoy doing is playdough. We were given themed playdough mats and had to add playdough details to them. We had to make doctor’s instruments like a stethoscope and we had to add glasses to people’s faces! We usually have a cut and stick station too to practise our cutting skills. We like sequencing the nursery rhymes that we are learning. Sometimes we have a construction station. We made hospitals out of Lego and Duplo this month. On Fridays, we have freeplay. This means we can play with any of the toys in the classroom. We just love playtime in Junior Infants!

In English, we started learning our Jolly Phonics! We love listening and singing along to the Jolly Songs as well as listening to the sound story and answering questions about it. Sometimes our teacher hides the sounds around the classroom and we have to find them and think of some words that contain that sound. We also love playing ‘I Spy’ when we are learning our sounds. We have started to learn how to write these sounds too. We learn the formation through different stations including writing the sounds in sand, on whiteboards, doing rainbow letters and covering the sound with counters! When we finished the first group of Jolly Phonics, we started blending little words! We are also doing lots of activities to develop our fine motor skills. Building up our hand muscles will make us excellent writers! We do fun activities each day such as cutting, writing our names, threading beads, playing with polydrons, pegboards, links, connecting cubes, straws, jigsaws and playdough. We also love story time at the end of the day, some of the stories we read were, ‘The Gruffalo’, ‘The Gruffalo’s Child’ and ‘Owl Babies’. 

We love our interactive Gaeilge programme, Bua na Cainte. We explored two themes in September – Mé Féin (Myself) and Lá Bréithe (Birthday). We learn songs as Gaeilge (in Irish) and listen to the conversations. We like learning little phrases that we can say to our friends and our teacher. Sometimes we play with little picture cards and ask our partners some questions as Gaeilge. We also love the games on Bua na Cainte as they develop our listening skills!

In Maths, we have been doing lots of counting games and we learnt how to sort objects into sets according to colour, shape, size, number and type of object. We learnt how to make patterns with two colours (ABAB) and we’ve been learning how to write some of our numbers. We enjoyed playing maths games including ‘Happy Faces’ and ‘Sweetie Jar’ as they help us to develop one-to-one correspondence! We made sets of two and three items and we learnt the names of the 2D shapes – circle, square, rectangle, triangle, oval and hexagon. We played a fun feely bag game with the shapes and we went on a shape hunt around the school. We also made 2D shapes with pegboards and lollipop sticks as well as making 2D shape pictures.

In S.E.S.E. (Geography, History and Science), we learnt about our families and our school. We had lots of fun learning about our school as we got to go for a tour of the school and then we worked together to build an aerial view map of it! We learnt about the work of a doctor and an optician and we learnt the names of all of our body parts. Finally we learnt about the stages of the human life cycle and how we grow from a baby to a child to a teenager to an adult! 

In Music, we were learning lots of lovely nursery rhymes. We particularly like ‘The Grand Old Duke of York’ as we get to march around the classroom! In Art, we made lots of lovely things including, self portraits, x-ray hands and Owl Babies pictures. In P.E., we have been playing lots of playground games and working on our throwing and catching skills with beanbags. We are very lucky to have Coach Steve from Shankill GAA coming in to us each Friday to do Ball Skills with us too! In S.P.H.E., we have been learning all about being a good friend and using our ‘Kind Hands, Kind Words and Kind Feet’ in school. 

We hope you enjoyed our blog, we know it was very long but we did so much in September and we wanted to tell you all about it! Tune in next month to hear about what we got up to in October!