Fáilte go Rang a hAon (2)

You are all very welcome to our class page. Make sure to check in regularly to get a glimpse of some of the fun activities that we get up to in First Class 🙂

Items to note:

This week is ‘Friendship Week’ (4th- 8th October).
Our PE days are Wednesday and Friday. Please ensure PE tracksuits and runners are worn on these days. On Wednesday we will be exploring the ‘Outdoor and Adventure’ strand and on Friday we will be looking at the ‘Games’ strand where we will be taking part in tennis with Stephen.
Due to our staggered entry and exit times, our class starts at the earlier time of 8:15am. Please ensure you arrive on time, but not too early, as entry to the main yard will not be available until 8:12am. Our school day finishes at 2:10pm. We enter and exit the school via door D which is on the main yard at the ramp.

October 2021

SPHE: The first week of October is ‘Friendship Week’. Each day this week we will complete activities on the topic of friendship. On Monday we will be given a ‘secret friend’ who we will keep a really close eye on over the course of the week. On Thursday evening for homework we will note what positive things we noticed about our secret friend and we will identify ways that we showed kindness towards this person. We might even try to confuse our other classmates by demonstrating random acts of kindness towards others in the class so that they don’t know it’s us! The whole idea is that we will get to know other classmates who, although we may be friendly with, we might get to know better. On Friday we will have the ‘big reveal’ where we will find out who had us as a secret friend. We will also get to see the positive things that our friend has written about us. Will our predictions be correct?

We will also be learning poems and singing songs about friendship. We will also be looking at the traits of a good friend and will be looking to see what we value in a friend. Friendship is so important so why not have a good chat with your child about it at home over the course of the week. Below please find a brainstorm of what we feel makes a ‘good friend’. Or whole school also took part in creating a monochromatic display that you can see in the school lobby. Many thanks to Ms. Moriarty for organising it. Can you spot yourself?

Gaeilge: This month we will be exploring two different themes. For the first fortnight we will be looking at the ‘Sa Bhaile’ theme and in the second fortnight we will look at Oíche Shamhna as part of the ‘Ócáidí Spéisialta’ theme.

Maths: Numeracy Power Hour will continue this month. With Mr. Glynn we will be continuing to explore money and we will also be focusing on length. With regard to money, we have been playing a dice game where we roll the dice and take the appropriate amounts of money. The winner is the first person to get to 20c. We made the game harder by introducing two dice. We also looked at ensuring we took the minimum amount of coins. We also looked at exchanging our coins for those of the same value. Recently we have been looking at shopping activities and seeing if we have enough money to buy particular items. If we don’t, we have been looking to see how much more money we would need. We have been looking at the concept of change and ensuring that we don’t pay too much for any given item!

English: This month we will be focusing on the comprehension strategy of ‘visualising’. We will still be revising ‘making predictions’ from September. We listened to a poem called ‘My Neighbours Dog is Purple’ by Jack Prelutsky. As Mr Glynn read each stanza, we had to draw what we visualised. We weren’t allowed to go back to our previous drawings once we moved onto the next stanza. Here is a selection of our work. The dog turned out to be a painted crocodile!

September 2021

(and what a busy September it was!)

Our new classroom: This year we are on a different corridor. Our classroom is Room 5.

Numeracy Power Hour: Numeracy Power Hour started in our class on our first day back at school and will run up until mid November. During Numeracy Power Hour Mr. Glynn, Ms. Carty, Ms. Keogh and Ms. O’Meara all help us with our maths. Mr. Glynn works on the measures strand and the other teachers work on helping us to develop a deeper understanding of the number strand. Power Hour takes place every day from 9:10-10:10. During the month of September we worked on ordinal number, the days of the week, the calendar and we began looking at money with Mr. Glynn. Here are some pictures of us working hard in Power Hour.

Gaeilge: In Gaeilge we focused on the ‘Mé Féin’ theme for the month of September. We learnt the phrases ‘Dia duit!’, ‘Dia daoibh!’, ‘Dia is Muire Duit!’, ‘Cé tusa?’, ‘Is mise _’, ‘Cad is ainm duit?’, ‘_ is ainm dom’ and ‘Conas atá tú?’, ‘Tá/Níl mé go maith’, Cé hé/hí sin?’, ‘Sin é/í_.’, ‘Cé atá sa phictiúr?’, ‘Tá _ sa phictiúr’ and ‘Cén lá atá ann inniú?’, ‘Inniú an _’. We also learnt a selection of rhymes and songs that included ‘Taidhgín Turcaí’, Cé atá sa Phictiúr?’, ‘Ceann, Gualainn, Glúin ‘is Cos’, ‘Teidí Tinn’ agus ‘An Luan, An Mháirt’.

English: We revised our senior infants sight words and have been looking back through our class readers from last year. We made sure we know all of the words before starting our new first class reader, ‘Finn’s Dream’. We started Reading Groups and they take place each day from Monday to Thursday. Each group lasts for seven minutes and during these we practice our sight words with Ms. Morris, read aloud to Mr. Glynn and engage in free-writing activities. Sight word lists can be found here: ‘The Big Horse’, ‘What a Mess’ and ‘Stop that Dog’ and ‘Finn’s Dream’ and ‘The Four Friends’. We used the words to write sentences as part of our homework. Mr. Glynn has been checking to make sure our sentences make sense. Some of us even got stickers for our fantastic sentences!

We have also been working really hard with our cursive handwriting. We started straight back at our first lowercase cursive letter which was ‘c’ and we have been working our way through each of our letters. Here is the exact wording that we have been using when practicing the formation of each of our lowercase letters.Some of the writing has been so good that Mr. Glynn had to check that there were no parents hiding under the tables doing the work for the children! We are very proud of the time and effort that we have been putting into our cursive writing.

Each week we explore a new spelling pattern as part of the Jolly Grammar programme. On a Friday we have a spelling test based on the weekly spellings. During the month of September we looked at the following spelling patterns: /sh/, /ch/, /th/ and /ng/. Spellings can be practiced at the following website – https://www.spellingcity.com/users/JollyGrammar This website has loads of fun games that can help us to revise our spellings and we can even take a practice test before the actual one! Why not check it out if you get time?

Digital Learning Skills: We have been practicing our iPad skills over the past few weeks ensuring that everyone can lock, unlock the iPads, making sure that we know how to clear and move between different screens and have been exploring the different functions of the camera and video recorder. We also learned how to access a coding app called ‘Sprite Box’ and an app called ‘Lightbot’.

PE: Our PE days are Wednesday and Friday. So far we have been playing lots of fun games, we have started to cover the Outdoor and Adventure strand and have been doing tennis on Fridays with Stephen. Check out the pictures of us in action!

Games:

Outdoor and Adventure:

Games – Tennis:

10 minutes additional Physical Activity:

In an effort to work towards our Active Schools Flag, every week we try to do at least 10 minutes of additional physical activity. Here are some photos of us taking part in a ‘Go Noodle’. They help to keep us fit and active and also let us have a bit of a movement break in between our learning. A class favourite has been ‘Fabio’s Meatball Run’!

SPHE: The children listened to an interesting story called ‘Have You Filled a Bucket Today?’ We discovered that everyone has an invisible bucket that can either be filled or dipped. We brainstormed ways that we can help to become ‘bucket fillers’ and we looked at how people can also be ‘bucket dippers’. How can you help to fill someones bucket?

We are delighted to be back to school but we also know how important it is to keep everyone safe. With all that has been happening with COVID-19, we know what it is really important to ensure that we keep germs at bay. We have been revising how to wash and sanitise our hands correctly and have been making sure that we follow all COVID procedures. Here is a link to the YouTube video we watched to help us learn how to wash our hands properly – Handwashing – WHO

Art: We discussed how individually we are all unique, but collectively we all make up our awesome class. We have also be focusing on portraits. Have a look at some of the fun activities we have taken part in so far.

Jigsaw Art:

We all drew a self portrait and wrote our names on individual jigsaw pieces. When we put them together we were a able to see how, combined, we are a winning team! It’s displayed outside our classroom for all to see.

Name Tags:

We explored different types of line and created our own labels for our art folders. They looked so impressive we decided to display them in the corridor before we stuck them onto our folders.

Monochromatic Portraits:

As part of a whole-school art project in advance of Friendship Week we created monochromatic portraits. Each class in the school will create these portraits using the colours of the rainbow. Ms. Moriarty will display these in the lobby at the start of October. Lets see if we can spot ourselves in the whole-school display!

Geography/Science: This month we have been looking at the green schools theme of litter and waste. We have been identifying what materials can be recycled and those that cannot. Did you know that soft plastics can now be recycled along with hard plastics? We listened to a story about a magpie called Maurice who struggled with recycling and we helped him to classify items into those that can and cannot be recycled. We have been using our own classroom bins to help us remember what items can be put into each bin. Our bin monitor checks our bins daily to ensure that only the correct materials have been put in each bin. We have been working hard to ensure that we bring home our lunch waste. On the 16th we took part in a webinar and learnt all about ‘Picker Pals’. We look forward to working on the initiative later in the term. Here are some photographs taken during the Picker Pals webinar.

History: We have been looking at our family and our school in history. We have been looking at who makes up our family, the things we used as a baby that we don’t use now and the things that we use now that we didn’t use as a baby. Recently we have been looking at the history of our school. Harold’s Cross NS dates back to 1831 when it was located at the entrance to Mount Jerome. At this time parents had to pay lots of money to send their children to school and very few children were lucky enough to get to go. Our current school building was built in 1937, and as old as Mr Glynn is would you believe he didn’t work here at the time! The new school was built as there was a huge demand for places. At the time there was a separate boys and girls school. Our school building was originally the boys school and Scoil Mológa was the girls school. In 1988 the boys and girls schools amalgamated due to a decline in pupil numbers. The girls section was left unoccupied for a number of years until 1993 when Scoil Mológa opened in the original girls section. If you look over the hall you will see the date that the original school was built. Only a few years back there was only one of every class and now we have two of each class. Have a look at how our school has changed over time.