WELCOME TO OUR THIRD CLASS PAGE!
Have a look through the many exciting things that are happening inside and outside our classroom this year!
PREPARING FOR OUR ASSEMBLY PERFORMANCE
We have been really enjoying learning our song ‘Léim isteach sa ngluaisteán’. Pupils are doing so well learning the lyrics each night as part of their homework. This video may help parents to help them with their pronunciation as they are practicing.
GYMNASTS IN THE MAKING
Our second p.e strand that we have been covering this term along with dance is gymnastics. We have learnt a number of jumps, playground games to build our muscles, rolls, balances and animal walks. A lot of the content was new to us and we have been really enjoyed the challenges Ms. O’ Meara sets us. Some weeks we put all our work together and work sensibly at different stations. Our newest roll we have been trying to perfect is the backward roll. Ms. O’ Meara uses the i-pad to video us at this station and then we look back at the clip and try to pick out what we did well and something we notice we can do better. When we don’t have the i-pads our partners often tell us instead. We really have improved in how we work in small groups and with our partners. Well Done rang a 3! Here is a collage of the video clips from one of our station lessons.
CELEBRATING CHINESE NEW YEAR IN THIRD CLASS
We read all about the Chinese New Year in our Reading Zone discovering some traditions that are popular for this celebration. We also discovered how the 12 animals for the Chinese calendar were chosen and tried to figure out what animal was representing the year we each were born in. We then linked our Chinese art to our First Steps procedure genre and followed a step by step approach to design Chinese dragons. These masterpieces are hanging up outside our new classroom and we are getting so many compliments from passers by on the amazing drawings. Here are just a few examples!
SAFER INTERNET DAY – 5TH OF FEBRUARY
We celebrated Safer Internet Day on Tuesday the 5th of February. We discussed this years theme which is ‘Together for a better Internet’. We focussed on the importance of permission and being a good digital citizen when online and a big focus was placed on using apps and social media. The pupils shared lots of situations where they have been good digital citizens and were also posed with a number of situations they may encounter online and had to problem solve the best way to act if this happened to them. We really enjoyed our discussions. There was also a whole school poster competition and we all took part in designing a poster to show how we can work together for a better and safer internet. Ms Everlien was so kind to deliver wristbands for each pupil to take home as a souvenir for the day and parents here is a link for you to access resources to support this work at home
Some of the entries to the poster competition. Now we have to wait a few weeks to hear if our class has any winners!
ZUMBA FINISHED FOR THIS YEAR 🙁
We had our final session with Audrey on the 1st of February. She had a brilliant session planned for us and we really enjoyed it. Audrey was really impressed with our enthusiasm and creativity in our dances and may even return for one day during Active Schools Week to see have we even gotten any better! Here is a video of our last session.
BUDDING DENTISTS AND DENTAL NURSES AT WORK IN OUR CLASSROOM
We have been learning all about healthy eating and the food pyramid. We progressed on this week to look at our teeth and how they are important in the digestive. We examined our own teeth using mirrors, discovered and identified the incisors, canines, premolars and molars. We then used clay to recreate a model set of teeth with a partner. We didn’t stop there. We worked with the i-pads and created a short oral presentation focusing on eye contact & clear loud speech. Have a look at all this work below here.
ZUMBA IN JANUARY
Every Friday this month we have been lucky to be getting the opportunity to dance with Audrey. Have a look at the video of us on Friday. We do a few dances whole class then we have to work in smaller groups to compose a dance routine together and then we have a dance off. If there is time at the end we love a chance to free style!
RUDOLF AN FIA RUA
We have been practicing Rudolf the red nosed reindeer for the past few weeks so we decided to also link him into our art lesson this week. We followed some easy steps to create a portrait of this famous Christmas animal. Then we painted it and to put the finishing touches to the masterpieces we used oil pastels. Some of the pieces are hanging on the window of our prefabs for parents to see, here are some more fantastic end pieces.
WE WENT GAGA ON THE 5TH OF DECEMBER
Get all girls active campaign is an initiative to encourage girls to become more active. We decided to join with 4th class girls this morning and take part in a fitness video live on You Tube. It involved all the girls doing a high intensity workout involving many different exercises from jumping jacks, burpees, mountain climbers to a really enjoyable plank. We did each each exercise for 30 seconds and then took a short break before moving on to the next one. It really was a great way to spend 15 minutes and the girls said they really enjoyed doing it without the male participants ‘who love to show off at things like this’.
Here are a few short video clips of us
MASTERING MULTIPLICATION
3rd Class maths involves pupils learning a lot of new topics. Multiplication was a topic we were really eager to start and it has been very enjoyable for us learning our multiples with lots of games with our partners and online each day in class. Here we are playing one of our favourite partner games ‘Rock, paper, scissors’
Here are some links to the games we have been playing in class
https://www.education.com/game/multiply-by-8-skiracer/ (Registration is free for the 1st month)
https://www.timestables.com/times-tables-shooting.html
https://www.topmarks.co.uk/maths-games/hit-the-button
CONSTRUCTING MESOLITHIC HUTS
Mark taught us all about the mesolithic people in Ireland and he showed us a collection of homes these people would have lived in. We then worked in groups of 4 to reconstruct our very own huts. We left these on display in the lobby for everyone to see and only last week did we raffle them off among our class. There were 4 lucky winners who got to take the huts home and keep the architectures there forever long they last!!
HALLOWEEN MASK DECORATING
We had great fun in class this week creating such artistic masks. We used a mask template first where we planned a suitable design and then we used this to help decorate our very own masks to take home just in time for Halloween. Here are some photos of us wearing our masks!
MATHEMATICIANS AT WORK!
Here are some useful links to fun interactive games we have been playing during maths in class. We have been working really hard on our addition and subtraction tables and playing the game below will really help students become really quick at recalling the addition and subtraction facts.
https://www.topmarks.co.uk/maths-games/hit-the-button
MATHS WEEK 2018
This week we have been celebrating Maths Week in our school. We have been playing many new games in class and we took part in an amazing and really challenging maths trail in our Junior playground.
We have been covering the topic of time in class where we are learning to read the time in 5 minute intervals on both the analogue and digital clock. Here are some photos where we are working in small groups in a loop game. We managed to get all around the class without breaking the loop which was a big challenge!!
These links below are really helpful in helping students improve their skills with both the analogue and digital clocks.
https://www.topmarks.co.uk/Flash.aspx?f=matchingpairstimev3
https://mathsframe.co.uk/en/resources/resource/116/telling-the-time
FRIENDSHIP WEEK 2018!
From the 1st to the 5th of October we celebrated Friendship week in our class. We discussed what makes a good friend and came up with 24 different ideas and made an art display. We learnt the infamous ‘ Count on Me’ song from Bruno Mars in music. We each had a secret friend to look out for over the week without letting them know. We cant wait to see how many people figured out their mystery friend on Monday. We have started a random act of kindness wall where we note down some nice, kind random things people have done for us during the day. The wall is growing day by day! We also learnt how to be complimentery to each other and we each went around the room giving each other compliments. We have a few more activities to complete over the next few days but I hope we will remain great friends over the year remembering friendship is one of the key ingredients to a fun and enjoyable classroom.
The Blue Ringed Octopus
The blue ringed octopus has been a much talked about sea creature in our classroom over the past two weeks. We did a poem ‘an t-ochtapas’ as Gaeilge and we read a lot of facts about them. We were amazed by some of the facts which you will be able to read about when we take home our First Steps copies over the next few weeks. When we were completing this work, we also integrated the octopus into our art lessons where we sketched the octopus, coloured it with oil pastels and did the sea background was completed using water colours. Some of these masterpieces can be seen on our prefab window. Have a look at some of the works of art in the making below.
Archaeology with Mark
Third class are going to work with Mark the archaeologist over the next 8 weeks where he has some really exciting work lined up for the pupils. He started last week by explaining what an archaeologists job consists of. He brought in many artefacts to show us and we had lots of questions for him about these objects. At the end of the session we took part in mini digs and each group found many different artefacts. Have a look at the photographs from the day.
We really enjoyed our trip into the city centre for archaeology on Friday. We started the day in Christ Church Cathedral where we took part in a treasure hunt. We worked in small groups and had lots of different places to find on the map. Each place gave us really interesting facts about this famous monument. We found the cage where St. Laurence O’Toole’s heart was stolen from but we were delighted to hear it is going to be returned soon. We also saw the famous cat and rat that was excavated from the pipes in the Cathedral. After the treasure hunt we went on a walk around the city with Mark and visited the City Wall and Gates dated from the 13th century and he also took us to the ruins of viking settlements too. We are pictured below on the tour.
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OUR BIG DIG
We had a great afternoon out in the dig area of our school with Mark. We broke up into small groups of 2 or 3 and mark gave us different areas to excavate. We were amazed with some of the artefacts we discovered in the ground. We learnt how careful and tidy an archaeologist has to be on the job. Every now and then Mark would stop us and ask us could we figure out what exactly we have been excavating and some of us came up with the right answer that the settlement was that of a Viking house. We even figured out that there was a toilet at the back entrance to the home. We also realised it is important to take notes of the discoveries and we had to complete some measurement and counting activities to finish up the excavation. Below we have lots of photographs from what we did on the day and the artefacts that we found.
Clay Pottery Making
This week in archaeology we looked at the neolithic period from between 4000BC and2000 BC. We created our very own clay pots from the neolithic times. We looked at many of the different designs that were found on pottery at that time and tried create a similar piece ourselves
P.E activities
Skipping Workshop
As part of our p.e this term we got to take part in a skipping workshop. We learnt lots of new skipping techniques and are really enjoying having the opportunity to practice and improve our skipping on the yard each lunchtime.
Outdoor & Adventure Activities
We have been spending the month of September and October covering the Outdoor & Adventure strand for one of our p.e lessons a week. Here you see some of us taking part in a photo star orienteering activity.
We progressed on this week in our p.e outdoor and adventure lessons to use a map of the school to find controls. So each control was marked with a number on the map. We had to go to each control and there we had a maths problem to solve. Some of the problems were quite tricky to work out but we got it completed eventually. We really have enjoyed linking maths with P.E this week to celebrate maths week 2018.
Gardening with Patrick
The day that Patrick came to visit was a really wet day so we couldn’t complete any work in the garden itself. That didn’t stop us though. Instead we did some propagation within our classroom. We took the cuttings from plants in the garden and tried to use these to create more plants. It was quite easy to do this. All we needed was grit compost and the cuttings themselves. We worked with lavender and sedum cuttings and also planted some spinach and PakChoi seeds too. We have to put them into our garden now and wait to see the results.
