Welcome to Mrs. O’Meara’s class!
Take a look at what we got up to this year.
April
April has come and gone in a heartbeat! Following our Easter holidays we dived straight back into learning under our new theme “The Zoo”. We have been keeping a close eye on the Dublin Zoo Webcams, spotting penguins and elephants while learning about all different aspects of zoo life and animals from around the world!
March
March has been jam packed with lots of learning and activities! Spring has been our theme and in this we have learned so much including all about the garden centre, the life cycle of a frog, sowing plants, the life cycle of a plant, Vincent Van Gogh and his famous sunflowers and much more.
The month began with an exciting visit from an exotic pet farm, thanks to the Parents’ Council for organising this.
We had lots of fun teaming up with Ms O’ Brien’s class, looking and listening about the different creatures and we were given lots of opportunities to ask
questions and pet some of the animals!
During this month we celebrated St. Patrick’s Day. In preparation for this, we celebrated Seachtain na Gaeilge where Gaeilge was alive and well throughout the school especially on Lá Glas where we recited a Dán Gaeilge at our outdoor assembly and performed An Rince Mór at our Céilí mór!
We made lots of St. Patrick’s Day art including Seamróg agus Bogha Báistí!
We learned about the life cycle of the frog and had so much fun in our sensory swamp with green slime and tadpoles/frogs etc. and made a beautiful frog display board in our classroom.
In Aistear we experienced life in a garden centre in the role play area, we worked in the construction corner preparing shelving and other items for the garden centre. We explored the swamp in the sensory area as well as digging in the sand garden for minibeasts and observing them under the magnifying glass! In the creative area, we created reports and drawings on the garden centre and its plants, designed flower pots for the garden centre
sales and took part in mindfulness colouring.
We learned about Vincent Van Gogh in art history and looked at and responded to some of his most famous paintings including the sunflowers. We became artists ourselves and produced our own Sunflower paintings while listening to some mindfulness music. We also wrote reports on the sunflower in English.
Experimenting in Science is one of our favourite things to do and this month we completed an experiment with flowers, learning how water travels up the stem and all around the flowers. We used food colouring to observe how the water travels and where it spreads to. This was all part of learning about the life cycle and parts of a plant. We also planted cress seeds and watered them every day. We might even try them out on a sandwich or salad when we bring them home!
We are excited about spending time with our families now over our Easter holidays and will look forward to what term three brings us!
February
February has been fantastic and full of exciting activities and learning.
We continued with Gymnastics in PE focusing on balancing. We really enjoyed learning about the different ways to balance and incorporating them into our own sequences.
We went on a Spring walk through the village where we spotted signs of spring and stopped to discuss them before arriving at the River Derry. Here we observed the river, the animals that inhabit the river and we looked at the surrounding areas and talked about the river’s part
in the water cycle. We wore our high visibility vests following learning about keeping safe on our roads and singing the “Safe Cross Code”
February is the month of St. Brigid. We learned about our Patron Saint, sang St. Brigid’s song and listened to stories about her. We read about her cloak and how she came to get enough land to build her Church and convent in County Kildare. In Art we used fabric and fabric markers and we each designed a piece to contribute to a cloak. Like St Brigid, our cloak kept growing the more pieces we added!
This month we started doing Maths in Early I in our classrooms. So far, we have enjoyed learning about Weights, exploring Capacity using the water tray, Maths puzzles and activities and using our number line and Numicon to improve our adding skills.
We were very excited to team up with Ms O’Brien’s class for story time and art. We listened to the story “The Day The Crayons Quit” which inspired us to show our creative side which we displayed in a walking art gallery!
We were delighted to invite Ms Wadding’s Third and Fourth class to our room for buddy reading! We read our class readers to them before choosing a book from the library that they read to us! It was great fun. They even stayed with us for Aistear!
We loved showing them our games and activities and playing alongside them.
Our favourite part of the month was Pancake Tuesday! Rinneamar pancóga agus bhí siad blásta! We mixed the batter, cooked the pancakes and enjoyed them with lemon, sugar and fresh fruit! Yum!
Following this we discussed our Lenten promises and visited the Church on Ash Wednesday to get ashes on our foreheads. We are looking forward to what comes in March and we are really looking forward to Easter!
January
January has been a very busy month! It was great to be back with our friends after Christmas and hear all about the wonderful holidays. We were very excited for “Show and Tell” day where we got to bring in something from home to talk about in class. Most people brought in a new gift they received for Christmas and it was lovely to see everyone presenting their item to the class and explaining what they liked about it!
We have taken part in a lot of activities and lessons over the last few weeks including GAA training sessions with Eric, classroom activities such as busy breaks, dancing with GoNoodle!, word games, hand prints, road safety, the safe cross code, learning about being a good friend, writing activities and maths activities.
We had great fun, in particular measuring in Maths using links/chains! We paired up to measure and record our findings.
One of our favourite parts of each week this month has been Gymnastics in PE. So far we have been learning about different jumps and how to put these into a sequence.
Our themes for the month are “The Estate Agents” and “Africa”. We have explored different types of homes, old and modern and discussed different types of houses from different parts of the world. We learned about African animals.
In Art we used clay to create 2D elephants.
In Aistear this month we based our learning around homes and houses. In role play we created an estate agents office where we took turns working as the estate agent selling the houses to our customers who came to view the various properties. In construction we used lego and magna snaps to build all different types of homes. Small world play took place in the sand tray this time where we used construction vehicles and other resources to create a construction site. The creative table was great fun this month. We took on the role of
architects in designing houses and gardens. We even compiled all our designs into a book.
It has been a busy month full of learning and fun! We are looking forward to see what February has to offer us!
December
December has come and gone in a whirlwind of carol singing, Christmas art and activities as well as our usual learning and classroom activities.
We have been working very hard preparing for our Carol Service which was a great success and we all enjoyed it very much. We had lots of fun practicing in the Church and hall and learning our LÁMH song “Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer”.
In Aistear we learned all about the Post Office and the journey of a letter. The Post Office is especially busy this time of year delivering letters to the North Pole and delivering parcels all over the world. In role play we became part of the postal service and delivered packages and letters around the school once they had been sorted in the sorting area!
In the construction area we put our design expertise to the test in designing and building suitable post boxes. Postman Pat made an appearance in the small world area where we created a delivery service from the mail centre and delivered packages around the town.
We especially enjoyed the Literacy/creative table where we each wrote our own letter, placed it in an envelope, addressed the envelope and posted it in our classroom post box.
We read all about the postal service in our class readers in Senior Infants and also enjoyed the book “The Jolly Postman” by Janet and Allan Ahlberg.
Art this month was really special. We loved creating Christmas pictures, drawings, colouring pages and especially our Chubby Little Snowmen that we made from white socks and rice!
We were busy taking part in colouring competitions and Christmas Card competitions and were delighted to hear that one of our two class winners Billy was awarded a highly commended prize in the overall school competition. Well done!
We teamed up with Ms Hayden,s class this month for some buddy reading. It was so exciting to have the senior pupils come to our room and read stories from our library with us. We can’t wait to do it again!
Along with all these activities we have loved learning and showing our class elf “Sprinkles” just how wonderful we are.
We are looking forward to Christmas now and spending some time with our families and already looking forward to seeing all our friends again in the new year!
Nollaig Shona Dhiaibh!
November
Our theme for the month of November was “People Who Help Us”. We focused in particular on the hospital and the Fire Station. Aistear was full of imagination and fun. In role play, we pretended to work as Doctors and Nurses looking after our sick patients waiting in the waiting room! We also had a chance to get into character as heroes when we created scenes at the FireStation. We dressed as firefighters and responded to emergency situations before jumping aboard our fire engine to save the day! Meanwhile in construction we created buildings that would catch fire and require the roleplay department to attend! The creative table had the chance to play dice games, colour pictures and create items using playdough. In small world, we used our imaginations to create scenes of accidents and attend the local hospital where the people were looked after by Doctors, Nurses and other staff. We also had the chance to create scenes of fires and accidents and respond from our small world fire station using our town map and emergency vehicles.
In other subjects this month, we had a great experience learning how to waltz. We partnered up and learned to perform our 1, 2, 3 step!
Teidí Beag Álainn got some much-needed attention in Gaeilge! Bhí timpiste aige! We gave him some plasters and sent him to bed!
Focusing on the print strand of the Art Curriculum, we made some wonderful art pieces this month, using our handprints we created x-rays and we used vegetable printing to create fires for firefighters to put out.
In Maths we are continuing to learn our numbers and we also spent a lot of time learning about 2D and 3D shapes. We searched for shapes in the environment, explored each shape, tested if they could roll or stack and sorted them into groups.
We are very excited to see what December brings!
October
October has been a very busy month in the Junior and Senior Infant room. We have learned and explored so much particularly through Aistear. Working with our farm theme, we had so much fun creating Drama in our role play area, the “The Farm Shop” We displayed great team work in our construction and small world areas, here we had to build farm sheds, buildings and pens for the animals. In the small world area, they were busy working at the farm house
and getting the animals into their correct enclosures. The creative table were busy writing shopping lists for the farm shop and creating masterpieces using playdough.
Working under the theme “The Witches’ Den ” we had a lot of fun in the role play area creating a cave full of spells and potions. The construction area was filled with witches’ caves and hideouts while the small world area set about creating a haunted house. At the creative table, lots of emerging designers created Halloween costumes.
This month we teamed up with Ms OBrien’s class to bake chocolate biscuit cake. Lots of teamwork, patience and helpfulness was needed for this task. Following this up we completed a piece of recount writing about how we made the cake. There was great enjoyment as we each brought home a slice. Yum!
Other enjoyable events of this month included Maths Week. We took part in daily problem solving and we completed some group work with Fifth and Sixth class. We made numbers with playdough and we joined a live zoom call where we listened to a story called “Cuthbert Sees Double”. As a result, this inspired us to complete an art project where we doubled our painting!
We learned all about ourselves in SPHE and the importance of our name and our facial features and how they help identify ourselves. This inspired us to complete self-portraits.
In Science we explored magnets and talked about Magnetism and how magnets stick to metal. We had great fun predicting and testing.
Cliff, our class teddy, joined us this month and he is really enjoying his weekend adventures. We love hearing all about it when he returns and seeing the lovely entries into his scrapbook.
We were sad to say goodbye to Catherine, our Yoga instructor but we really enjoyed our time with her. We enjoyed Thursday morning adventures and relaxation.
We are very excited about our Halloween break, our Halloween Walk and festivities. We have had so much fun and learning in October. We have spent lots of time with our friends, developing conversations, friendships and learning about traditions around Halloween.
We are looking forward to seeing what next month brings.
September
We’ve had a busy start to the year in Mrs O’Meara’s room getting our newest pupils settled and used to school life! Along with being busy learning we have been having so much fun at playtime both in the classroom and on the yard especially when we join forces with our next door neighbours, Ms O’Brien’s!
We do activities such as playdough, painting, jigsaws, games, group activities, free play and much more. We have dropped into the multi-sensory room for some chill out time and the playground to burn off some energy! PE, Gaeilge and Art are becoming a fast favourite and we can’t forget playtime! We are really enjoying Music Generation lessons with Elsbeth, our music instructor and we particularly love Thursday morning yoga with Catherine.
Two of our highlights this month were Senior Infants joining forces to bake cookies and our popcorn party on Friday for Golden Time! Both of which we have no photos of as we were having so much fun we forgot to get some snaps! We are looking forward to what the next month brings us!
