Welcome to Junior Infants 2
We have had a busy start to the year with much fun, excitement and learning.
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.
