S E P T E M B E R
Welcome To Room 7
Room 7 is ready and patiently waiting for some new friendly first class faces 😊
Teamwork Makes The Dream Work
Take a look at the impressive teamwork skills the children displayed this week as they worked together to build a fort during Aistear 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼
The Glow Up Salon is Open For Business
For this weeks Aistear we have opened a hairdressers in our classroom which we have called The Glow Up Salon. This ties in with our theme of the month, ‘Myself’, and is helping us describe our appearance more accurately, especially our hairstyles! We spent our Aistear time on Monday setting up the hairdressers, thinking of vocab that we needed, setting up and staging our Role play corner and creating labels for our Aistear board! We then had three stations for the reminder of the week which we really enjoyed! At one station we were working hard on color mixing skills as we mixed primary colours to ‘dye’ the wool ponytails that we created. We also designed some very eye catching leaflets for The Glow Up Salon to help us get more customers at another station. And our final station was working in the hairdressers! Take a look:
Ten Out of Ten
We have spent lots of time revising and reinforcing what we know about the number 10 to get us ready for the bigger and bolder numbers that first class has to offer! Take a look at how we used a ten frame to write the Story of 10 independently on our white boards:
Golden Time
The sun came out for some golden time at the playground today! The children have been working hard on having a nice line, being ready when I do a countdown and having a quiet, calm classroom each day to earn this special golden time! We have a trip planned to the Library next!
Artist of the Month
Our class was tasked with learning all about a famous artist for the month of September in our new Artist of the Month challenge. We spent September learning all about our chosen artist, Vincent Van Gogh, and have spent the month analysing his works of art and creating our own works of art inspired by his pieces. Then we created a display so that the rest of the school can come and visit to learn from us now that we are Van Gogh experts! We learned that he usually painted portraits or landscapes and that liked using oil paints, bold colours and small brush strokes. Ms Martin’s class have been given the Artist of the month challenge for October and we are really excited to visit their board at the end of October to learn about their chosen artist. Take a look at our display below and maybe you could be inspired by Van Gogh too!
OCTOBER
A Meet and Greet With Author/Illustrator
Lauren O’Hara
Our class were very lucky this month as we got to meet the author and illustrator Lauren O’Hara at Castletymon Library. She read her beautiful book Frindleswylde to us and after she hosted a creative crown making workshop where she helped us design a crown of our own 👑. In preparation for meeting her we studied some of her illustrations from the book as a class and watched a video where we got to see how she created some of the illustrations ✍🏼
Maths Week
We had a great time celebrating Maths week in the lead up to Halloween! To mark the week we continued learning about number and this week we’re investigating the number 16! We made a set of 16 counters and in pairs used our set and a 16 frame to help us tell the story of 16! We also had a problem solving workshop where we tried to solve problems involving number and pattern in groups! We also got to visit Ms O’Connells estimation station to try estimate how many sweets and how many cookies were in the jars! To end the week on a high we learned how to keep a tally and went on a 2D shape hunt around our school! It turns out our school is full of 2D shapes 🟡🟪🔷🔺🔸! We all worked super hard, especially our Mathmatician of the week who won a certificate and a treat from Ms O’ Connell
Short Vowel Sounds
We have being doing lots of work on the vowels a,e,i, o, and u since starting first class in the lead up to revisiting our vowel digraphs after Halloween! This week we spent some time discussing and identifying words that have a short vowel sound in the middle. We realised that bag, net, bin, box and mug all have the short vowel sounds a,e,i, o and u in the middle. We pulled these items out and then tried to write a list of other words that have these short vowel sounds in the middle. We wrote our lists, cut up our words and then put our word in the bag, net, bin, box or mug based on the matching vowel in the word! The word cat had to be put in the bag because it had an ‘a’ in the middle. The word ten had to be put in the net because of the short e sound in the middle.The word mop had to be put in the box because of the vowel sound o in the middle and so on! It was a really fun activity that allowed us to practice our vowels, blending skills, rhymes, handwriting and cutting skills, while also incorporating a little bit of movement into our lesson too! Take a look below 📸
A Catch Up With an Old Friend!
We were so lucky when Castletymon library invited us back in October to meet another author and illustrator. This time it was Alan Nolan who we met previously in May when he hosted a workshop in our school for all classes! He is such a funny and entertaining storyteller so it was great to catch up with him again and hear all about his new book! We loved learning how to draw funny characters with him by following his step by step instructions!
Halloween STEM
We had lots of Halloween fun in our class in the lead up to the mid term! During Aistear we each did a pumpkin investigation before we scooped our pumpkin pulp out and decorated it using markers! In the investigation we had to estimate and measure our pumpkins height using cubes, estimate and measure its width using links, estimate and count the lines around the pumpkin and estimate how many seeds would be inside! We also got to make marshmallow skeletons in Aistear using toothpicks. We planned out the skeleton using plus plus bricks first to get an idea of the shape and then got to work with the marshmallows (we might have nibbled on a marshmallow or two in the process just to test the quality 😂). We also got to mix potions in Aistear. To start we researched some potions and magic powers on the tablet and then we wrote a list of ingredients we would need for our potion. Finally we got to work finding items in the art press or outside in nature to mix together! Some of us started to fly or even became invisible, thank god the potions wore off after a minute or two! We ended the week by investigating the effect of heating on chocolate and making some scary chocolate rice crispy spiders with the melted chocolate! Our Halloween parade and assembly were also two highlights of the week! Happy Halloween from all of us in Ms Griffin’s class 💀👻🎃
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER
2D Shape Hunt
Take a look at our 2D shape hunt that we went on for maths week! We got to practise identifying 2D shapes, keeping a tally and counting in 5s all at the same time!
Proud Library Card Owners
We are all now officially library card holders in our class and got to practise checking out a book at the library! We are already excited to head back on another visit to borrow more books!
Our Community
We had great fun recreating buildings from our community using cardboard boxes! We were super excited to set up and display our new town outside our classroom door for all to see!
Guess Who?
We spent lots of time working on narrative writing this term and know that building a character is a key element of narrative writing. We had great fun opening these character sacks and trying to guess who our character might be. We then spent some time discussing what adjectives would best describe our character.
Aistear Fun
This month in Aistear we had great fun working on the theme of Community! We opened up a vet role play corner and realised it is impossible to know everything about every animal so we created factual books on an animal of our choice to help the vet in his work! We also worked as a team to plan out the road system for a town too to make sure everyone has access to all buildings in the community.
Hands On With 2D Shapes
We have been working hard learning all about 2D shapes including trying to identify how many sides and corners each shape has! We traced and labelled 2D shapes, we recreated them using lollipop sticks and pipe cleaners and we even cut 2D shapes in half to see what 2 shapes they were mere up of!
Hot Chocolate Party
We had a few frosty days this December and we decided to keep nice and warm by having a hot chocolate party! There was hot collocate and chocolate elf biscuits for everyone in the audience!
Nollaig Shona Duit
December was such a busy month preparing for the first Christmas show to be held in Aonghusa for 3 years! We were almost as busy as Santa’s elves and it’s safe to say all our hard work paid off with the school hosting a fantastic show that all enjoyed! To mark the occasion the big man in the red suit himself paid us a visit with some treats!
JANUARY
To Infinity and Beyond
This months theme is Space and after a month of learning all about the solar system we could give NASA a run for their money! We set up our own space station with accompanying rocket, have been researching planets on the iPads and have been recreating the solar system using oil pastels! This theme has really been a class favourite!
Actions Speak Louder Than Words
This month for grammar we’ve been learning all about verbs which we now know is an action word like jump, hop, skip or play! We have been working on changing regular verbs into the past and the future tense! We know that practise makes perfect so we will be sure to get lots of practise with verbs throughout the year!
Reading Buddies
We have new reading buddies! We are very lucky to have some 4th and 5th class pupils from St Rose's National School come to visit us on Fridays to help us read!
Our Art is Out of This World
Take a look at our 3D models of the solar system...we think they are out of this world!
MARCH
Pizza and Procedural Writing
We have been working on procedural writing this term in first class. Recipes are a great example of procedural writing and we have been looking at lots of these. Ms Griffin gave us a recipe for a cheese pizza that had been cut up and we pieced it back together in our groups. We then followed the steps in the recipe to make a cheese pizza...it was delicious! After we used the cheese pizza recipe to write our own 'Crazy Pizza' recipes. Our crazy pizzas had toppings like smarties, marshmallows and even worms! Take a look at our cheesy smiles below.
Budding Builders
We have been enjoying studying the theme of houses and homes this month and are having lots of fun in the Building Site at aistear. time.
Happy Mother's Day
Happy Mother's Day to all the mam's of SAJ. Our class made lovely Mother's Day cards to go with the gift we made for our mams. We used some clay and the pinch technique to make love heart shaped bowls which we inscribed and then painted. When they were dry we filled the bowls with lots of lovely sweets to take home for our mams.
Spring Has Sprung
As part of our science lessons this month we conducted an experiment to see for ourselves what plants really need to grow. First we did the research and identified what plants need to grow: 1. Water 2. Soil (Nutrients) 3. Sunlight 4. Air. After we had Identified these 4 things we planted a tray of cress seeds with our group which were then ready to be taken care of for the next two weeks. We decided the best way to see if plants really needed these 4 things to grow was to give one tray of cress everything it needed while another group would not give their cress any water and the third group would not give their cress any sunlight. We pulled from a hat to see which group got what and got to work taking care of our plants each day for two weeks. The cress that got no water grew a little bit but not as tall or bushy as the cress that got everything it needed. The cress that got no sunlight grew tall but was not full and busy and was brown in colour. It turns out sunlight helps the plants stay green and healthy looking and water helps it grow tall and strong! Our conclusions - water, air, sunlight and soil are all so important!
The Garden Centre
We have green fingers this month in first class. Take a look at some gardening fun as we set up our very own 'Garden Centre' for aistear this month. We opened our very own role play Garden Centre, have been creating some digital flower art and flower themes ebooks on the ipads and have been busy building garden furniture (including some beautiful flower beds).
APRIL
Maths for Fun
Here in our class we always have fun with our maths but it is extra fun when the mams and dads come in to play our maths games with us! Thanks to all who took part!
All About Ireland
Our class hosted an assembly this month to teach the school All About Ireland. We spent a week learning about each province and it's counties and conducted a survey of the staff in our school to see which county they come from. We presented the results to the school and they were happy to hear that we have lots of staff from Dublin in our school although Clare gave us some competition. Up the Dubs! We learned a poem to help us remember the counties and also performed the song Beidh Aonach Amarach along with an Irish dance and the Haka Gaelach. At the end we got the whole school on their feet to teach them the Haka. Take a look over on our school instagram page for the videos!
MAY
STEM Week
This year for STEM week we dedicated a day to each subject. Monday was for Maths and to mark the day we used our Six Bricks in our lesson. Tuesday was for Science and we conducted the 'Walking Water' experiment to learn about capillary action using the three primary colours. Wednesday celebrated Technology so we used the Bluebots in our Irish lesson to practise giving each other directions as Gaeilge. Thursday was Engineering which included lots of construction activities and Friday was a STEMathon where we got to see some of the STEM work the other classes had been working on.
Happy Earth Day
Happy Earth Day from Ms Griffin's Class
Breakfast in Ms G's
We have been working super hard in this final term and to celebrate all our hard work Ms Griffin decided we deserved a little treat! We had spoke about how it would be lovely to have breakfast together so that's what we did! In class we each planned out a shopping list for a breakfast menu on our whiteboards and then we used our maths data skills to decide the class' favourite cereal. We had a lovely spread of pancakes, toast, cereal, pastries, yoghurts, fruit and juice!
Summer Dreaming
The lovely warm weather and sunnier skies have us summer dreaming here in first class. We decided to make the most of it by taking a trip to Bancroft playground for our golden time slot. We had lots of fun playing football and using the swings and climbing frames! We hope to do it again soon!
