In the Spring Birds Sing!

We are learning all about spring!

We went on a walk around the school. We looked out for signs of spring. Have a look at what we noticed.

Winter is over. Spring is here! The buds are growing and opening up. The leaves are starting to grow from the buds. We found a twig with a bud on our walk. When we came back to the classroom we put the twig into a jar of water. After a few days look what happened!

We drew buds on a bare tree. There are other signs of spring in this picture. Can you name them all?

We used cotton buds and paint to colour spring pictures. We dipped the cotton buds in the paint and then dotted the cotton buds onto the page. This type of art is called pointillism.

Here are some up on the wall. The rest are in the top picture of this post.

We sorted pictures of chicks hatching from their eggs. First we coloured the pictures. Next we cut them out and finally we glued the pictures into the correct order.

We painted cherry blossoms. We began by painting the branch using a paintbrush and brown paint. Then we dabbed green paint along the branches to look like the leaves. Lastly we dipped our fingers into light pink paint and dabbed them all around the branches to be the beautiful cherry blossoms. This was our favourite part.

Here they are up on the wall. Don't they look fabulous?

We went to the secret garden to weed our beds of garlic. Do you remember we planted cloves of garlic back in November? Click the picture to read that post.

Ms. Carr showed us the garlic shoots. We knew we weren't to pull out the garlic but we could pull out the green plants that looked different. They are called weeds. When they are there it is much harder for our garlic to grow.

We planted peas, ivy and flowers into old shoes. First we filled our shoe with compost, leaving space to put in the plant of course! Next we put in the plant: either a flower, a pea or ivy. Finally we pat more compost around the plant to secure it.

Don't they look great? We will put them in the garden some time after the Easter holidays.

Aistear Madness in March

We had some new activities for Aistear in March.

The Home Corner

We pretended to be mammies, daddies, children and even grandparents. We looked after the baby in the home.

The Gingerbread Man Small World

We played the parts of the different characters from The Gingerbread Man Story. There are lots of characters in the story such as the Gingerbread Man, the old woman, the old man, the pig, the horse, the cow and the fox. We told the story using the handheld characters.

Word Games

We practised the sight words we know. We played a matching game with Ms. O'Flaherty. We took turns reading the words and finding the matching words. We then played a dice game. We rolled the die and it landed on a number 1-6. We had to read the word that was on the number we rolled. If we could read the word we got to keep it!

Cutting and Fine Motor Skills

We continued with the cutting table this month. The first week we coloured and cut out shamrocks for the shamrock headbands.

The following week we sequenced the rhyme Little Boy Blue.

The final week we sequenced eggs hatching.

Art

We had a different art activity each week. We started with the junk art in the first week.

Next we used cotton buds and paint to create pointillism spring paintings.

The last week we cut out Easter Eggs and rearranged them to make the Easter bunny.

March Pupils of the Week, Birthdays and Food Dudes

Well done to these super boys and girls who are the pupils of the week for March!

These children celebrated their birthdays in March. Fantastic five-year-olds!

Food Dudes is still going strong in Room 2.

When a child brings in their food diary, filled with the fruit and vegetables they ate for 16 days, they get the Diary Certificate just like this boy!

Every time a child brings fruit and vegetables to school they get closer to getting another Food Dudes Certificate. First you get the bronze certificate and then there are many more certificates to get after that!

There are even some children who have gotten the silver certificate!

Keep up the good work!

Sight Words 2

We have learned more sight words.

Note: We have not learned "we" yet.

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.

make



not



one



play



red



said




the



up



we



yellow

St. Patrick's Day and Seachtain na Gaeilge

Every year we enjoy a fortnight in school where we celebrate all things Irish! We call it Seachtain na Gaeilge. We make an effort to speak as Gaeilge (in Irish) and have a number of special events taking place. Have a look at what we did in Room 2.

 We made St. Patrick's Day headbands in the lead up to the Special Day. We coloured in Shamrocks and cut them out. The shamrocks were then stapled to a band of paper. Teacher had to measure around our heads to make sure they fit. Don't they look fantastic!

On Friday we wore green. We had a special dance in the hall called a Ceili. During PE we learned an Irish dance. We performed the dance on the hall in front of the whole school. We were fantastic!

We watched the other classes perform too. We had a great day!

Earlier in the day we found a picture. It fell out of teacher's Leabhar Rolla. We didn't know where it came from. We had a think and realised that the Leprechauns must have put it there! They sent us on a treasure hunt around the classroom.

We needed some special magic to open the box. We used a magic Irish wand and our Irish phrase, Oscail é más é do thoil é, (open it, please) to finally unlock the box. Inside the box we found the leprechaun's gold coins!

We took part in an art competition. The competition was based on a seanfhocal (an Irish proverb). The proverb is "Giorraíonn beirt bóthar." This means that two people shorten the road i.e. two is company. Here are some of our drawings.

And here is our winner! Well done Sophie!

We learned about Irish instruments. We listened to Irish music and played instruments to the beat. Then we put down the instrument and did some 1,2,3s!