Welcome to Junior Infants 2
We have had a busy start to the year with much fun, excitement and learning.
March:
March has arrived and what a busy start to the month!
Pancake Tuesday : We learned all about making pancakes, sequenced the recipe and designed our own favourite pancakes, What is your favourite topping?
World Book Day: A huge shout out and thank you for everyone at home that helped make this day so special for the children! The Junior Infants were unrecognisable on Thursday morning when they arrived in dressed as their favourite book characters. We had a fantastic day, telling everyone about our costumes and favourite book, whilst also getting the chance to buddy read with third class! We all also got a world book day token to encourage us with our reading at home!
Can you recognise who’s who?
What a busy week before St.Patrick’s Weekend , as Seachtain na Gaeilge got underway and a mischievous leprechaun who kept us on our toes all week appeared in our classroom!
Bhí Comórtas Ealaíne, Banna Ceoil Tradisiúnta, Gael factor, Céilí Mór agus Cóisir Theidí ar siúl i rith na seachtaine agus bhaineamar an taitneamh as go leor!
February:
Spring has arrived and for the 1st February the children discovered there is an advantage to having a connection with Donegal – there are plenty of rushes to makes St. Bridget’s crosses with!
We read the story of St. Bridget and learned about the significance and tradition of cross making in Ireland
Check out our crosses below:
Aistear: This month the theme was “The Veterinary Clinic”. The children took on various roles as receptionists, vets and surgeons throughout the month and learned all about how to care for animals, whilst learning new vocabulary.
Aladdin Pantomime : This month we got a very special surprise when Aladdin The Pantomime came to our school. The music, singing and dancing was fantastic and the children had a great afternoon of entertainment.
Chinese New Year: We learned all about China this month. We really enjoyed learning about a different culture and country and had a great time learning a cultural dance from a guest speaker about the creation of the Chinese Zodiac calendar. We even created our own Chinese dragon as a class which is now hanging up in our classroom for all to see.
January:
Welcome back we hope everyone has enjoyed their holidays and are looking forward to the year ahead!
2019 is already turning out to be a very busy year take a quick look at some of the things we got up to this month!
Our GAA coach was with us for another few weeks and this month we got to try Hurley. We had lots of fun and taught Ms Campbell a thing or two about Hurley!!
Irish Dancing has started this month and we are working hard to learn our steps it takes a lot of concentration!
In Maths we are looking at patterns. Check out some of our work below!
In Morning stations we had two really cool stations this month check out our bridge constructions and our water play!
Having studied the Robin in science this month we were delighted to welcome Patrick to our classroom! Patrick taught us all about the different birds around the school and we then got to go on a bird watch to see if we could spot some, we had to be really quiet not to scare them away !
The Enormous Turnip: For the month we have been exploring this text in both Drama and English we have made visualisations of what we think could have been inside the turnip, sequenced the story and acted out many scenarios associated with it. Last week however we narrated the whole story check out some of the pictures below as we pulled and pulled!!!
Cén saghas lae é? Tá an lá fuar/ te/ fluich/tirim i …… (Donegal, Dublin, Cork, Galway)
December:
Junior Infants 2 wishes everyone a
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year !
November:
This month we have been very ACTIVE!
Our Active Teds (Active Andy and Baller Ben) have started to go home and so far have been on some great adventures!!
There has been both a coach for Zumba and GAA coming in and we are having great fun whilst learning lots of new skills.
We were not in Aistear this month and therefore have been working hard on our fine motor activities in the morning. Have a look:
We made lots of abstract constructions it was tricky to get them to balance at times but we had fun seeing how tall we could build them.
We also played our “POM POM” game using wooden pegs, this took lots of concentration and strength in our fingers but we all encouraged each other!
Our scissor work is also improving each morning, as we learn to hold the scissors properly whilst cutting out our jigsaw pieces!
With our amazing imaginations and creativity we also enjoyed our free drawing station where many a masterpiece was created! We even got to use Ms Campbell’s ‘special’ markers!
One of our favourite stations is still play dough, this month we got some new cutters to experiment with as we created some delicious treats!
October:
This week was Maths week, we played maths games using stations and got to go on a shape scavenger hunt with fourth class in the garden which we really enjoyed.
From the start of the year we have created some beautiful pieces of artwork which can be seen displayed on our classroom walls. We have been focusing on the technique of printing and looking at patterns using oil pastels. We have also created an Autumn nature window and hedgehogs using some of the leaves we collected. The whole school focus for term 1 in art is “architecture”, we looked at city scenes using the shapes we have learnt to create tall and unique buildings.
Aistear has started this month and the children will be doing it month on, month off. Our theme for this month is “Autumn/Halloween”. We have five areas (Creative, Construction, Small World, Sand and Socio-dramatic) and rotate daily.
The Aistear room is so much fun and a great place for social interaction, development of oral language and imaginative thinking .
At the sand we were digging and sorting shapes.
In small world we built hibernating huts for our hedgehog and created autumnal scenes.
In socio-dramatic we were hosting Halloween parties, writing invitations and preparing food.
In the creative area we went on a nature walk gathered leaves, created leaf rubbings, made hedgehogs and hoglets using play dough and sticks.
Finally in construction we have been building some very scary witches houses.
The children have been working hard on “Our Alphabet Book” since the start of the year. When we complete a new sound they are invited to draw a small picture to add to the book if they wish. Here is a sample of some of their amazing work and I would like to say a special thank you to any parent, guardian, brother/sister or grandparent who has helped and encouraged the children with this book.
So far we have completed Group 1 and 2 sounds following the Jolly Phonics programme. All of the songs from the programme can be accessed through YouTube using the following link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtFpxnXlwC0
In Maths this month we have been doing a lot of work and discussion around shapes. We worked together to create shape monsters, here are some of them.
The first week of October was Friendship week, we learnt all about how to be a good friend, focusing on the theme of sharing using the story “The Rainbow Fish”. Based on this book we created our own Rainbow Fish collaboratively as a class, each child created their own patterned scale using oil pastels and when we joined them all together we managed to create our master piece which we put up outside our classroom for all to see.
In September we were all getting to know each other. In the morning we worked on our fine motor skills through different play stations, which included threading, archi-blocks, peg boards, counters, making patterns, playing with play dough and cutting.
