Ms Conneely's Class Junior Infants: April 2012

Penguins

We read this book and learned alot about penguins.

Here is some of the penguin art the children made.

The penguin is a flightless bird. There are many different types of penguins. We learned all about Emperor penguins. We found penguins to be very interesting birds.

The Emperor is the largest of the 17 penguin species.

Emperors are the deepest divers of any bird.

They are also very strong birds.

The mummy lays her egg in mid-May, then leaves to spend the winter at sea.

The daddy spends the next 65 days looking after the egg which he rests on his feet.

In mid-July, when the mummy returns, she finds the daddy by having memorised his call. The daddy penguin carefully gives the egg to the mummy. The egg hatches soon after.

Emperor chicks grow quickly because they have only five months (that is just from when we started school to now) to reach the stage where they can fend for themselves. (we dont think we are quite ready to leave home just yet)

Penguins eat Antarctic silverfish Pleuragramma antarcticum. They also eat other fish, Antarctic krill and some species of squid

Teddy bear timeline

We made a teddy bear timeline.

This a new teddy bear

(we could own this one)

This is a teddy that Mum and Dad might have had when they were children

This is a very old teddy bear

(Our Granny's and Grandand's could have owned one like this)

Pizza Party

A special treat from Ms Coleman for doing our school so proud in the Féile Scoildrámaíoctha.

Sense of smell

The sniffing chair

We learned all about our senses. The final sense we learned about was our sense of smell. We had seven bottles with secret ingrediants inside. We all had the opportuninty to try and guess what was inside the bottles; number 1 contained hot chocolate, 2 contained coffee, 3 contained ketchup, 4 contained vineger, 5 contained curry, 6 contained chlorine and 7 contained washing up liquid.
The children were very good at guessing what was inside the bottles using just their sense of smell. The only one that caught everyone out was number 7, everyone thought that was bubbles.

We all had great fun with this activity.

Gardening

We were learning what plants and seeds need to help them grow. They need sunshine, oxygen water and soil to grow. We all planted seeds in our mini garden. We planted sunflowers and baby carrotts. We have to look after them and make sure they get enough water to help them grow.

We even found some creatures in the garden. We found "an itsy bitsy fuzzy wuzzy worm" from the song we learned recently.

Our trip to the beach

During the lovely weather we had last month we took a trip to the beach in Renmore. We all decided we were very lucky to have a beach so close to our school. We talked about how beaches are made and what we would expect to find on the beach. It was very important that we all kept safe in the sunshine. We talked about the importance of applying sun protection lotion regularly on hot sunny days. We practiced the safe cross code on our walk to the beach.

When we arrived at the beach, the teachers had lots of PE equipment in their cars for the children to play with. We all had a great day. The teachers really enjoyed the sunshine. We all hope we have some more beautiful weather to enjoy.