Junior Spider awards

Learning about the Advent Wreath and the Crib

Outside Ms Coleman's office is a beautiful advent wreath.  The four candles around the wreath represent the four weeks leading up to Christmas and they symbolise hope, love, peace and joy.

The candle in the middle is lit on Christmas day. 

 The school has a fantasic crib inside the main door.  We learned all about baby Jesus being born in a stable as there was no room anywhere else for him.  We are practicing very hard for our nativity play, where the inkeeper has a very busy life and lots of noisy guests and no rooms left for Mary and Joseph. 

We made some lovely Christmas cards with the nativity scene on the front of them. 

Advent

  Student of the day 5th of December

Student of the day 6th of December

Letter Puddles - Junior Infants

We do one new letter every week. 
We learn a song for the letter, make the letter from play doh, hear a story about the letter, write the letter and find things that start with that letter. 

So far we have met the letters; a,b,f,g,h,i,j,k,m and p.
The letter for this week is t.
 We know a very clever song about all the letters and their sounds...it starts A "a" aligator, B "b" ball, C "c" computer, D "d" doll.... (If you start us off at home we will sing it for you)


Today we played a fun game called letter puddles.  The idea is that you have to make it across the river with out missing a letter, you can only step on the letter once you name it, give its sound and something that starts with that letter (A says "a" as in apple).

Everyone had great fun with this game, even teacher had a turn, she knew all the letters, phew :) 

 

Learning about our senses

Today we learned all about the sense of hearing.  

Everyone in our classes can use their ears to hear but we know that every one in the world does not have the sense of hearing.   

We talked about all the ways we use our hearing; learning to talk, learnig in school, talking with friends and family, crossing the road, listening to music and the television.  

We tried using just the sense of hearing today.  This is what we heard when we concentrated hard on listening; 

Footsteps

A car

A truck

Wind

The teacher in the classroom next to us talking

The whiteboard.

  

The we played a game using just our heaing to identify different actions.  

Here are the ones we identified; 

             A tamberine 

             Shaking water in a bottle                    

             A book being closed with a bang   

             Teacher typing on the keys of the laptop

             Sharpening a pencil ( this was the hardest of all because we had to listen very carefully)

                        

Its begining to look alot like Christmas

Through out Advent we will have a student of the day.

Student of the day 1st of December

 

Student of the day 2nd of December

                                     Our advent calender.  It helps us with the countdown to Christmas. 

 Some of the Fantastic Christmas art we have made.  These are Santas toy sacks.

We had great fun decorating the Christmas tree today. We think it looks magical!

We are special

We made puppets and they are all different just like all of us.  No one puppet is the same and that was our 

aim :)

We have been talking about families and how we are all different.  We named the people in our families and made prints of our families. 

What I want to be when I grow up

 

We have been talking about all the different jobs people can have.  We listed all the jobs and talked about what these people do in their day.  We took a giant leap into the future....... here is what the children in prefab 4 want to be when they grow up;

Fireman

Garda

Teacher 

The tooth fairy 

A transformer 

A rockstar 

A monster truck driver 

A postman ("just like my daddy")

A queen 

A princess

A babysitter 

A doctor 

A dressmaker

A cowboy ( "just like woody") 

Rain, rain go away

We learned that some materials are very good at keeping out the rain.  Umbrellas are a great way to keep the rain out. 

Clap, clap your hands 

very loud,

Stamp, stamp your feet 

on the ground.

Hum high, hum low

Next a great big blow!

Listen, listen
To the rain.

Softly, softly

Down it came. 

Absorbtion - science week

We learned about things made of wood and metal.  We also looked at materials that soaked up water.  We did an experiment to find objects that soaked up water.

We made these fantastic patterns using food dye and tissue paper.  We folded the tissue into triangles and dipped the very tip of the tissue in the dye and watch how the tissue paper quickly soaked up the liquid. 

Making sentences

 Some very clever children made up their own sentences using their names!! The thinking caps are well and truly on now!

Science week

We were learning all about magnets last week.

We were talking about the materials that are used to make the things we use every day; chairs, tables, lunch boxes, toys...  We discovered lots of different  materials; wood, plastic and metal.  It was very easy to find the metal things because it is hard, cold, shiny, strong and our magnets would stick to it. 

We also discovered that magnets are fussy things. They will not stick to just anything.  In a magnet north repels north, south repels south, but north and south attract each other. In our experiment that meant that the two blue sides would not stick together no matter how hard we tried and the two red sides would not stick together but the blue and the red attracted each other and stuck together very quickly.  In discovering this we learned that we could push and pull things using magnets or even make our magnets spin around in circles.

 

We tested lots of different things to see if they were magnetic.  We recorded the things that were on our worksheet. 

We placed the magnets in such a way that they repel each other and in so doing appear to be floating.  We thought this was like MAGIC!!

Aladdin

As we practice for our Nativity play, we were very lucky to see real actors prefom.  We learned that we must speak very clearly and as loud as we can just as the actors in this play did.  

Bingo

We have great fun playing word Bingo.  We are very quiet and use grat concentration and then we get to shout BINGO when all our words are covered.