January and February
After a restful Christmas break, we have had a busy start to 2024. In Aistear, we have been learning about Chinese New Year, polar regions and we have been playing at the dentist.
We have learned a lot more sounds since Christmas which is exciting because we are now blending words all by ourselves!
For Valentine’s we made beautiful clay pinch pots which we painted and decorated to give to someone special.
We were so lucky to have pancakes in school on Pancake Tuesday, we think there were a lot of chocolate smiles going home that day! The next day, we had a visit from Fr. Fitzgerald and Sr De Lourdes for Ash Wednesday and they blessed some of us with ashes.
Everyone is so happy that the weather is getting better and we are excited to spend more time learning outside as we get more spring-like days!
November and December
Junior Infants have had a VERY busy time in the run up to Christmas but we have had loads of fun of course. First we started to learn our sounds in phonics, we are listening for sounds in words, doing lots of sorting as well as blending. We are improving so quickly and our teachers know it won’t be long before we will be able to read some books all by ourselves!
Aistear has been so much fun with us getting to be doctors, nurses and patients. We even became engineers and builders, designing and building our very own doctors surgery, Our next theme was Christmas! We transformed into Santa, elves and wrapping paper designers as we worked hard in Santa’s workshop! We created beautiful art too, including snowflakes, decorated Christmas trees and even created our own ornament for a Christmas tree using salt dough. We had some naughty elves join us in our classrooms and had great fun discovering what mischief they had gotten up to the night before when we were at home!
We enjoyed working on stories like Owl Babies and the Gingerbread Man. We read the story, created our own Gingerbread men and Owl babies during Art. We even baked our own Gingerbread men which we gobbled up after we added some delicious decorations. Ms. Cox’s class even became Gingerbread men on their own baking tray when they decorated their classroom door for the 12 days of Christmas.
Science week was also a highlight this term; we got to be Scientists and explore magnets, discovering what was magnetic. We also experimented with hot and cold and we made jelly as part of our exploration. We of course had to add ice cream and enjoyed some delicious ice cream and jelly. We also had a visit from Little Red Kettle, we love their visits because we get to be part of the play and some of us were lucky enough to get called up.
Once December began we started learning our songs to perform our very first Nativity in St. Paul’s NS. Our nativity was called ‘The Sleepy Shepherd’. We worked hard learning our songs and actions as well as learning our lines every night at home. Our teachers are so proud of us, as when we put it all together we created a beautiful Nativity which we got to perform for the whole school as well as our families. Big Bualadh Bos to us!!
We really enjoyed the 12 days of Christmas and we especially worked hard to show kindness to each other. We created our own lights, a snowman, our very own class poem, hot chocolate as well as getting festive donning our Christmas gear and going on our Santa Run. We were helped by our 6th class buddies! We have loved visits from our buddies too, reading us books and helping to design our own Christmas jumper for the Toy Show.
PHEW as you can see we have been busy, busy, busy!! We really need a nice rest over the Christmas break. We hope we all have a safe, fun and peaceful break and look forward to seeing what the new year brings.
September and October
Our new Junior infants have shown great enthusiasm and are working hard and we are so proud of how well they have settled into St. Paul’s. We can’t believe we are already half way through term 1.
We have been busy playing this half-term and spending time getting to know each other. Our focus has been on phonological awareness work to prepare us for learning the sounds of the alphabet and learning how to read. We are also doing plenty of fine-motor activities such as playdough, pegboards and threading to make our fingers and hands really strong for when we begin to write.
We have also been taking it in turns to visit the Den during Aistear time, where we get to play, have chats and even do some baking! Every Friday, we take part in hurling and football training sessions with Ethan from Roanmore and we are learning new skills every week. Ann-Marie from Browne’s Road library kindly invited us over for a visit, where she read us two stories and gifted each of us some books to bring home. We were so lucky to have some of our parents in our classrooms on the last week of school for a Halloween story time and art activity, organised by our HSCL Ms. Kent.
We have been learning about all things Halloween recently and loved working in the magic potion shop during Aistear time and we even tasted some Barmbrack.
We are looking forward to resting over midterm after all our hard work, and recharging our batteries to get ready for new learning in November.
