Here’s what we’ve been up to in Ms. Kennedy’s Junior Infants:
Check out our AMAZING moves in dance class in June!
SCHOOL TOUR 2018
As we count down to our summer holidays we’e been taking a trip under the sea in our Aistear play groups. We’ve enjoyed learning about all the strange and colourful creatures from the ocean and love the song Baby Shark Doo doo doo doo! We’ve played in the sand, used lots of ocean vocabulary in bingo games and built castles and under sea shipwrecks .
For the past few weeks we’ve been working on different maths stations each morning. We’ve worked on ordering numbers, counting up and back from 10, using ordinal numbers, forming numbers with play dough, and lots of fun games like Make 5, Snail Trail and Dikki Dikki Dox , what’s in the box?
Active Schools Week has been one of our busiest weeks!
We took part in lots of different activities. First we had line up mash up with our fellow junior infant classes. It was a great way to warm us up for the busy week ahead. On Tuesday we had to “drop everything and dance” whenever we heard the bells rung at our class door. The Cha cha slide is lots of fun.
For “Walk on Wednesday” we went for lovely long walk through St. Mary’s grounds. The sun shone brightly for us to get back just in time before another shower of rain. 
Thursday was a sports packed day of lots of exercise, fun and games. We took part in sack races, egg and spoon races, relay races, skipping, hula hooping, ball handling skills, duck, duck goose and G.A.A. We really liked making a HUGE mushroom with the parachute and hiding under it too! On Feel Good Friday we enjoyed music playing on the yard so we could dance with our friends. We also went to our April Assembly where Mary Hickey who ran a “Lap of the Map” came to visit. She is a true hero and told us about her adventures along the coast. She presented Alicia with a prize for her “Keep Active” poster!
For Art, Music, Gaeilge, SESE and Aistear we’ve been exploring and learning about wild animals from the jungle and rainforests. We’ve read stories like Ronald the Rhino and Little tiger’s big surprise. We’ve wrote letters to the zoo asking them to send us a pet just like the boy from Dear Zoo. Our Tropical birds hang over us in our classroom, helping to turn it into a tropical land from faraway.
Our Tiger paintings are one of the pieces of work we are most proud of. We looked at Henri Rousseau’s painting called Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!) and drew and painted a tiger hiding in the rainforest vines and leaves.
For the last few weeks we’ve really enjoyed getting to read some of Mrs Ingham’s reading books. We work in groups to read lots of these stories, work on our sounds and letter formation. We really loved using the magnetic letters to form words and work on our blending. We even had a literacy station as one of our Aistear groups using magnetic letters to work on our CVCs.
In Maths we’ve been learning about full or empty and the number Zero. We love the song “Zero, Zero Superhero”. We worked on guessing/ “estimating” how many cups/ spoons / cartons it would take to fill the big jugs/ boxes and teapots.
Soccer Coaching has begun for our class. We’ve loved working with our coach on passing the ball, dribbling and fun games too!
Leading up to St.Patrick’s day 🍀, we made headbands and shamrock paper chains to wear over the bank holiday weekend. We’ve been putting in lots of effort in using cúpla focail gach lá for Seachtain na Gaeilge. We really enjoyed Lá Glas on 16th March and performing the HACA as Gaeilge at our assembly
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Ella and Kimberly created beautiful and colourful Easter bonnets – well done girls! We are getting so good at our cutting skills, we each made a cute Easter bunny face in Art.
Much to our surprise a certain floppy-eared friend 🐰 left us a special note on our last day before the holidays. He had just “hopped” by to leave us a little treat for all our egg-cellent work. We were SO excited and had such fun hunting around the classroom to find where he had hidden the yummy treats! We’re all hoping that he’ll be visiting us again over the Easter break. 
World Book day was such fun! Everyone put in HUGE effort in their costumes! In our class we had everyone from the Mad Hatter and Cat in the hat to Charlie and the chocolate factory’s Oompa Loompa and Mary Poppins to name a few. We took part in a World Book day quiz and smashed it! We celebrated by holding a Parade to show all our costumes to our friends in the halla and then we had a mini disco, where we played musical statues! We also loved looking at all the interesting books in the book fair on Monday and Tuesday. Overall, we had a great time talking about and listening to lots of stories and books!
In Aistear and SESE we have been learning about people who help us. Playtime allowed us to visit the doctor, be a brave firefighter and work on a construction site. We worked together to build our own table top town and had lots of fun pretending to rescue people in the town. We sang songs and said poems about important people and we especially liked 5 brave fire-fighters. We learned all about the uniforms, tools and equipment people need to do their important jobs. We matched the equipment to the correct people and unscrambled the cards to put the people who help us back together. We talked about what we would like to be when we grow up and drew pictures showing our future jobs! Watch out World!!!
As a whole school we are working towards an Active School Flag and here in Junior infants we are keeping active everyday with 10 @10, brain breaks and of course one of our favourites – Gonoodle! We are working super hard at helping our champs go through the transmogrifier and get maxed out! We keep adding new champs to our wall.
We really loved going to the Bring & Buy sale and buying some lovely toys, books and cuddly friends. The Magic show was a massive hit! We laughed our socks off at all the magic tricks! Some of our Junior infants even performed some magic tricks themselves!
For SESE and Winter Playtime we travelled to the Arctic and learned how animals like the polar bear keep warm in the cold cold weather. We went fishing, built igloos, rode on a snowmobile and spotted lots of animals on a scavenger hunt. Our imagination is really working hard and allows us to travel to lots of different places!
During Science week we became “Mad Scientists”. We did lots of different experiments like floating and sinking, is it waterproof? our dancing raisins and a bubbling volcano!
We especially liked making a balloon rocket fly across our classroom with the help of Ms. Bardon’s Senior infants.
We loved Maths week in October and we have made more shape pictures and shape friends using all the different shapes we have learned about. We also made patterns and tower blocks to match the numbers 1-5.
We love building lots of interesting creations in our Construction play group. It really helps our hands get strong and our imagination gets lots of exercise too!
We’ve just started practising using our scissors and are working really hard at this! Our play dough playgroup helps us make our hands and fingers strong and its fun too!
We’ve been learning lots about fruit and vegetables with the help of the Food Dudes. We read the Very Hungry Caterpillar and made our own caterpillars! Our Fruit & Veg shop in playtime helped us use all the names of different fruit & vegetables.
We’ve been getting to know our new classmates and have learned lots about autumn, houses and homes. Check out some of our pictures!
