Welcome to Junior Infants!
Welcome to our first few weeks in Junior Infants! We have been settling in so well over the past few weeks and have been enjoying playing with our new friends, learning Irish poems and songs as well as some energetic action songs, learning to write our names, and lots of cutting, sticking and colouring. We have also been learning about our homes and houses, and building houses and towers with lego, magnetic tiles and lolly sticks, as well as cutting and pasting 2D Houses. We listened to the story of the 3 Little pigs and acted out the story in groups, using our fun masks and props. We have also been learning about our numbers 1-10, 2D shapes and colours! We played number and shape bingo, and we are practising our fine motor skills by making numbers and shapes using playdough, foam and markers. We have had a busy few weeks in Junior Infants!
Happy Halloween!
Over the past 2 weeks we have been learning all about Halloween. We have been doing Halloween counting,
I Spy and bingo games. We also made lots of spooktacular Halloween art, like our haunted house silhouettes, ghost flying in the night sky and some witches! We learned our Oíche Shamhna poems in Irish and listened to lots of Halloween songs. Everypone looked amazing at our Halloween dress up day where we had a disco and made chocolate witches hats with cones and sprinkles. We hope everyone has a very Happy Halloween!
Science Week
For Science week, we conducted lots of fun experiments in the classroom and we even got to visit the blow up dome, where we saw all the stars and planets and watched astronauts take off to the moon on the overhead dome screen. We also got to build lego houses for our colour changing dinosaurs!
Christmas Postcards
We learned all about the post office and how we post our letters, with stamps on them, in the post box, which is then collected and sorted by the post man in the letter sorting office, and then delivered to our houses!
We coloured in and wrote a little message on our own little Christmas postcards. We then walked to the post box near our school and took turns posting our postcards in the green post box. We hope they get delivered in time for Christmas!
Polar Animals
After Christmas, we were learning about both The Arctic Circle (North Pole) and Antarctica (South Pole).
We learned about the Emperor Penguins who live only in the South Pole and the Polar bears who live only in the North Pole! We made penguins out of clay, played with the polar animal figurines in the fake snow, completed polar animal pattern sequences, sponge painted polar bear stencils and practised our counting with seals, arctic foxes, igloos, arctic hares and polar bear addition worksheets. We also learned about their diet and habitats. We really enjoyed listening to our stories of the week- The Iceberg Incident and The Curious Polar Bear.
Autumn
Over the last few weeks, we have been learning all about Autumn! For Aistear, we collected autumn leaves, conkers and pine cones and played with them to build homes for the hibernating animals- foxes, hedgehogs and squirrels. We made some leaf rubbings too using crayons and paper. We cut and paste triangles on our paper hedgehogs and scrunched up crepe paper to make our squirrels bushy tails. We even made hedgehogs out of clay and made their spines out of matchsticks! We cut and paste little scarecrows and finger painted autumn leaves and trees. We learned the poems/ songs- I'm a Little Hedgehog and Dingle Dangle Scarecrow. We also listened to the stories about the Scarecrow's Wedding and Don't Hog the Hedge. We also went on our Autumn Sponsored walk on October 17th. Thank you so much to everyone for your generous donations!
Doctors and Nurses
For the past 2 weeks, the children have been learning about doctors and nurses. They got to role play as doctors, nurses and patients and use doctor's equipment such as stethoscopes, injections, thermometers, blood pressure checkers and bandages. They made x-ray pictures using q tips and played doctor bingo and I Spy. We also listened to the story about Dr. Fen at Number Ten. We had great fun!
Winter Art
For Winter Aistear, we learned about weather changes and changes in nature- evergreen trees and deciduous trees. We completed Frozen themed jigsaw puzzles, which was great for pair/ team work. We cut and paste winter scenes with children bob sledding and making snowmen and we painted beautiful glittery wintery skies with snowy winter trees. We also made lolly-pop stick snowflakes decorated with sequins. We also fingerpainted snowstorms and pasted our wintery photos into the snowstorm! Check out our amazing art!
Merry Christmas!
We had great fun performing our Nativity "Shine Star Shine" with Senior Infants! We were busy practising hard for the last 5 weeks and we did an amazing job singing on stage for all the mums and dads! We wrote/ traced our Santa letters and got to give them to him when we went to visit him in St. Tiernan's Secondary School. We also made lots of beautiful Christmas art such as paper plate Christmas trees with sequins, gingerbread men and colourful Christmas baubles. Merry Christmas everyone!
We had great fun when Santa came to visit us here, in the Good Shepherd, with the garda band! We sang Christmas songs, got some lovely sweet treats and even got a hug from the man himself!
Restaurant/ Food Aistear
The children had great fun baking and making lots of fun things over the last 2 weeks! We made pizza rolls, jam sandwiches, nutella and banana toast, smoothies and banana bread. They also pretended to be waiters, waitresses, chefs and customers in our class restaurant. Check out all our fantastic food pics!
Junior Infants Cafe
Thank you to all the parents and grandparents who came to our cafe today! We hope you enjoyed being served pastries, crossaints, tea, coffee and banana bread by our little chefs!