Our Last Week in Junior Infants.

Wow! The year has gone so fast. We are now finished our first year of school. It's now the summer holidays!

We had great fun the last week of school. 
We had free play three mornings this week! That means we could play with whatever we wanted in the classroom.

We visited the secret garden to see our garlic. Remember we planted it back in November? It grew so much.

We all had a good look and a smell of the garlic. We brought some garlic home to share with our families.

We painted sandcastles and then stuck sand and flags on top.

Here are four children who missed no days or just 1 day of school! Well done you lot!

Enjoy the summer holidays everyone!

Drama Week

Every week we have a drama lesson with Ms. Walker. She is fantastic and so much fun! We had been practising two poems for a long time. "Upside Down" by Aileen Fisher and "Tiger" by Mary Ann Hoberman.

Ms McMahon organised a performance for Drama Week called "Drama as a Process". Every class had a part in the show. Our job was to recite the two rhymes.

We also made drama masks. We had to draw the face of comedy (the happy face) or the face of tragedy (the sad face). We decorated the hall with our masks.

We had a dress rehearsal on the Thursday. We had a chance to see the other classes perform their pieces.

On Friday we performed for all the people that bought tickets to the show - this included mammies, daddies, aunties, uncles, grandparents and more!

There was a huge crowd watching us. We did a great job. Teacher was so proud!

Aistear in June

We had new activities for Aistear for the month of June.

The Clothes Shop Role-Play

We set up a clothes shop in our classroom. We made a desk for the shopkeeper with a till, coins and shopping bags. We had a storage box for coats and jumpers, a box for trousers and shorts and little shelves for t-shirts, dresses and hats. We even had a changing room! We pretended to be the shopkeepers and the customers.

Cutting and Fine - Motor Skills

We sequenced the story The Very Hungry Caterpillar. We sequenced the life cycle of the butterfly. We gave five little ducks to Mother Duck.

Creative Station

We had two weeks of Junk Art.

We also had one week of painting the clay pots we had made. We made the pots as a whole class and then painted them during Aistear the following week.

We sent the pots home as a Father's Day present. We put sweets in theml.

The Forest Small World

We used small stuffed animals and finger puppets to create stories based around the 
lives of the animals.

Straws Construction

We used the straws to build 3D structures this month. Have a look at some of the great things we created.

Wonderful writing - v, w, u, y, x, z

When we write we sit properly in our chairs with our two feet flat on the ground. We hold the crayon in our writing hand and we hold our other hand flat on the copy so it does not move when we are writing.

We learned to write the letter v.

Start at the dot, slant down and slant up.

We learned to write the letter w.

Start at the dot, slant down, slant up, slant down and slant up.

We learned to write the letter u.

Start at the dot, go down, around and up and straight down to the line with a kick.

We learned to write the letter y.

Start at the dot, go down, around and up and straight down, down, down under the line and kick it back.

We learned to write the letter x.

Start at the dot, slant down and slant down.

We learned to write the letter z.

Start at the dot, bring it forward, slant back down and bring it forward.

Sight Words 4

We have learned ten more sight words.

To introduce each word I read a story which contains the word on each page.

You can read these stories with your children. Ask your child to find the words they know.
Some stories are a pdf file from mothershubbard.com, others are in powerpoint.

run

see

to

where

you

away

two

my

funny

three

Our Walk to the Park

On Tuesday we walked to the park at the community centre.

It was a lovely warm day. We had so much fun playing in the park with our friends!

When we came back to school we wrote We play in the park.

-ap word family

Meet the _ap family! The _ap family is made up of words who have "ap" hiding at the end, like map, cap etc.

We can also say they are words that rhyme with ap!

Can you think of more words that are part of the _ap family?

Watch this video to learn more about _ap words.

Can you try write these _ap words at home?

The Very Hungry Caterpillar

We read the story The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

We worked together to make a really long caterpillar. We made our own caterpillars using bottle tops and paint. We also made butterflies by rubbing a folded page with paint inside. Don't they look great!

We sequenced the story as a whole class.

We sequenced the story individually.

We wrote The very hungry caterpillar and drew pictures based on the story.

We sequenced the life cycle of the butterfly.

We drew the life cycle in our copies.

We drew pictures and wrote words from the story as part of our writing box activity in the morning.

Here is a display in the classroom about The Very Hungry Caterpillar!