Tuesday, 15 March 2016

Spring

We've noticed some changes taking place in the weather and nature lately. 

  • We've realised the days are getting brighter and there is more sunlight. This means that we have more time to do the things we want to do before it gets dark! 
  • We've also spotted some flowers growing. The flowers are growing because the temperature is not as cold anymore. 
  • Somebody else also likes the increase in temperature.......Mr. Hedgehog! He will be coming out of hibernation soon after having a long sleep!
  • Some of us have seen baby lambs and chicks. We've learned about all new baby animals being born in spring.


Come take a journey with us on our Spring walk and see what we found along the way.

Spring Walk


Stop One: Buds


The first sign of Spring we saw on our walk were buds growing on the trees! It was hard to spot these buds because the trees still look very bare and you have to look closely. We know that leaves will grow out of these buds soon. We are going to check on the buds every day to see if any leaves have come out. We hope to see the leaves soon!


Stop Two: Flowers


Next we saw some beautiful daffodils growing in a pot! We've made our own daffodils back at the classroom by painting egg cartons. We know that daffodils can be yellow, orange or even pale yellow!









We also found some grape hyacinths growing. These flowers look like a bunch of grapes!







Here we found another type of flower: a primrose! We're looking at a purple primrose. Can you see it too? We also noticed another yellow flower in this flower bed but it's not a daffodil. Can you find the yellow crocus?


In this flower bed we spotted yet another flower: the bluebell. We have been learning a song in P.E called "In and out go the dusty bluebells". We like to play this game and sing the song altogether.









Stop Three: School Garden



We went to the school garden to check how our garlic is growing. We planted this on a very wet day back in Autumn. We can see it starting to grow!




We had lots of fun!






Sunday, 31 January 2016

January Post


We had a lovely Christmas in Junior Infants. We were busy for most of December with our Christmas play which was a huge success - well done to all the performers and thank-you to all who came to see our play. After the play, we were still very busy catching up on work but we had lots of fun too. Santa even came to visit our school - look at us dressed up for that special day.



We returned to school in January after the Christmas holidays. This is what we've been up to during play-time!



Water Play



Water play involves working as a team, problem-solving and cooperating to achieve an end result. I think the boys have done a pretty good job at this and they don't mind getting a little wet!



Light Puppet Show




We really enjoyed reading the story of "The Gruffalo's Child" in class. In the story, a tiny mouse tricks the Gruffalo's Child into thinking it is in fact, a BIG BAD mouse. The mouse had a clever plan of hopping up onto a tree branch in the moonlight. This made the mouses shadow cast down on the ground making him look huge and scary!! Based on this story, we experimented with light using a torch and stick puppets. We love playing with the light box to see how shadows are formed.


Weather Station





In our imaginative play area, we have a weather station set up for this month. We've been observing changes in weather in Winter and we watched weather forecasts to see how it's done in real life. We like taking turns to be the camera man/woman, do the hair and make-up and be the weather forecaster. We even had the idea to do an advertisement after the weather forecast! There are some future TV stars among us in Room 3 -watch this space!

Lego



As always, we've had some fantastic creations in lego this month - some collaborative works and some solo too. We've gotten very good at working together and developing our ideas of what to build. Each day before play time, we get into a group 'planning huddle' where we plan what to do with our assigned activity. This gets us thinking ahead and makes us happy to see our plans come to fruition! After play we review the play session and listen carefully to a partner to hear what and who they played with. We've become excellent listeners and can report back the information we heard.


Junk Art




This month our creative activity for Aistear is 'junk art'. We have a big box filled with lots of recyclable items such as bottle caps, egg cartons, lids and various containers. We scrummage around and put our imaginations to the test to create ingenious constructions. We've had lots of different ideas, from objects we already know such as boats and telescopes, to machines you've never even heard of before! I sure hope some of these ideas are made into real things!


That's all from Room 3 for this month. Check back next month to see what we've been up to!