Junior And Senior Infants Class News
We have had such an exciting time playing in the snow. We left out straw for Rudolph and all the other reindeers. We learned about ice, frost and freezing fog.
We know the story of the first Christmas and that Jesus was born in a stable. We made our own crib and each one of us gave Baby Jesus a little present.
Guess what???? Santa knocked on our window and we heard the sleigh bells ringing. We are so excited. Happy Christmas and Happy New Year.
Golly gee, we have been as busy as a bee! We had great fun getting ready for Halloween. Incy Wincey and the Little Witch played lots of games with us and taught us how to fly our magic broomsticks. We were busy painting pumpkins, cats, spiders and making mobiles to decorate the classroom.
The Food Dudes, Tom, Charlie, Rocco and Rase taught us about healthy eating and encouraged us to eat fruit and vegetable daily. They showed us how to deal with General Junk and we learned the Food Dude song. We love being cool food dudes, and we use the fruit and vegetable boxes to bring our own fruit and veg to school everyday.
Autumn brought lots of delightful, beautiful colours to the trees, hedges and the countryside. Our nature table was laden with berries, apples, acorns, chestnuts and lots of different leaves. Harry hedgehog and Sammy Squirrel told us all the work they had to do to get ready for hibernating.
Now we are like Harry and Sammy, working really hard learning letters – with shapes and sounds, numbers, rhymes and silly but funny poems. School is fun!
What a landing on the day we opened the school - all the Junior and Senior Infants arrived with lovely new school bags, lunch boxes, pencil cases and lots of colouring pencils and crayons. Everybody settled in very quickly and now they are the 'busy - bees' of the school.
Our class will be so busy collecting leaves, chestnuts and Autumn fruits for a beautiful display on our nature table. We are also looking forward to fun at Halloween, playing with marla, painting with our fingers, and learning songs, poems, words, letters, shapes and nursery rhymes. Our favourite poem is 'I am special, Iam me, There's no one else I'd rather be.'
Wow! It’s hard to believe that it’s summer holiday time and that our school year has come to an end. Our last term at school was so busy, so exciting and full of fun! We learned lots of things about letters, numbers, words, reading, writing, full-stops and capital letters - so much information for such little heads and minds! Our favourite word this term was shop – we discovered that it can make another word posh and we enjoyed having ‘posh’ moments in our posh classroom.
Swimming was brilliant and after 8 weeks of lessons, we are now known as the Ardnagrath Mermaids and Mermen!
Adventures and journeys through the magic window in our classroom (known only to us) brought us to the magic world of story and nursery rhyme where the outdoor classroom became the home of Tom Thumb and his brothers – here they were safe from the ogre! Believe it or not, the 7 dwarfs also lived in this magical space, as did Snow White, Cinderella and Humpty Dumpty.
One of the funniest sights seen in Ardnagrath for a long time was the ‘crooked man’ with the crooked cat, walking the crooked mile trying to find the old crooked stile! Now we know that stile and style are pronounced the same but mean totally different things!
During the month of May, we had our altar dedicated to Mary the Mother of Jesus. We had rosary beads, holy water, art work and a statue of Mary on our May Altar.
Our Garden looks really beautiful with an array of flowers, a splash of colour and the most heavenly scents – we are so proud of our school and its environment and we enjoy taking care of it.
Our tour to the pet farm was so enjoyable and the sports day left us all very tired after a fun-filled day of activities. The ice-cream was yummy!
The new juniors came to school on June 21st and 22nd and boy were we busy! But we really helped them settle in and we think that they will be okay for “big” school in September.
Fr. Brilley celebrated mass on our last day of school and we sang, prayed and said “thank you” to God for our happy times during the school year.
Have a lovely summer, keep the smile on your faces, love in your heart and as Fr. Brilley said at Mass “if you can’t be good, be gooder”!!
It seems a long time since the “frozen” days but it’s been a really busy time for the boys and girls in the junior classes since the start of 2010!
Apart from the regular day-to-day work on the alphabet, numbers, rhyme, reading, writing and workbook, they’ve been setting up a fabulous shop; where shopping is promised to be as upmarket as Grafton Street, but with prices cheaper than Dunnes, Tesco or Bargaintown! Thanks to all of you who helped stock the shop!
Did you know that Humpty Dumpty went to the moon on a supersonic spoon, that Larry Leprechaun left a pot of gold under one of the rubber lock mats, that Mickey and Minnie Mouse keep watch over our classroom and that Spongebob creates havoc when we go out at lunchtime?!
During Lent, we really used our imaginations and imagined that Domitille joined our class - she is the little girl on the Trocaire box and is from Rwanda. We learned a lot about her and now we know that her family live in a small house with no water or electricity. Domitille collects water from the well and carries it on her head – you should see how good our class are at balancing bottles and cans on our heads! Our class learned how to say Muraheo and Murabheo -bet you don’t know what that means! Ask the experts from Juniors!
Fun days included World Book Day (the best disguises ever seen in Ardnagrath and its environ were on show on March 4th!) and an imaginary visit in Domittles village Rwanda.
Highlights of the term included “bulb friends” our contribution to the outdoor classroom project, and our “green team” effort every week.
A very special thanks to a past pupil, Mr. Malynn, who came in to do his teaching practice with us. We learned so much and had such fun and he looked very cool as James Bond on World Book day! We will miss you. Good luck!
One of our favourite words is Alleluia-which means rejoice, be happy!
So be happy! Rejoice! Murabheo, slán agus beannacht!
Ms. Flannery’s class can all be very proud of themselves, they have all been working extra hard since September!
Junior Infants have settled in very well and made lots of new friends. We know our letters of the alphabet, our BIG numbers from 1 to 5 and believe it or not our gaeilge is just go hiontach!! Our word envelopes are full to the brim and we’re learning new words every day.
Senior Infants have become real book worms, we’re almost onto our 2nd reading book about the Little Red Hen! Everyone enjoys these stories. Senior Infants have also become brilliant mathematicians! We’re adding big sums now and apparently it’s ‘easy peasy lemon squeasy!!’. Tá ár chuid gaeilge ar fheabhas freisin! Our colourful word wall has all the words we’ve learnt since September on it and we invite everybody to come and take a look!
We had our Halloween fancy dress party and let’s just say that Ms. Flannery is still recovering from the shock! The costumes were fantastic but very scary!
It’s winter time again and that can mean only one thing........look out! Jack Frost is about! He’s after our fingers and toes! All the girls and boys have learnt the poem and actions for the poem ‘Jack Frost’ and we’ve decided that he’s not such a bad fellow after all! We learnt about Little Robin Red Breast, where he lives and what he eats in winter. I’m sure we’ll see him out and about on the cold winter mornings!
The next big event that everybody is waiting in anticipation for is our annual school nativity play. Junior and Senior infants have a very important part in the nativity play and all the mammy’s and daddy’s will get a great surprise when they see all of their little ‘angels’ on stage! We’ve all been working and practicing very hard and hope that everybody enjoys the show.
We can’t forget a very special person this Christmas, Ms. Browne. We all hope that she gets better soon, she’s missed very much by everyone.
Finally, Ms. Flannery and her class would like to wish everybody a very HAPPY CHRISTMAS! Have fun everyone!
Hope everyone enjoys their summer holidays! See you all in September!
We have been so busy this last couple of months we don’t know where to start! But having said that, we will start with the most fun bits.
We are sure you all know the poem, ‘Mary had a little Lamb’! It’s about a little girl called Mary who went to school one day and her lamb followed her! We all knew this was only a nursery rhyme so you can imagine how suprised we were one bright sunny morning to hear we were going to have a special visitor! Yes, a newborn lamb. We had great fun with him as he was very friendly and he did indeed follow us everywhere we went! Thank you so much to Breda Moran for bringing the lamb up to us and we hope Miss Flannery didn’t turn him off coming to school by giving him too much homework!
We have had celebrities to the school also, in the form of two very sucessful race horses! Hardy Eustace and Schindlers Hunt paid us a visit and we were all amazed at their beauty and how strong and handsome both horses were.
We have been very busy doing class work too! We know lots of sounds now and how to blend them to make up words. We read a great story called ‘The Circus’ and made a lovely display with colourful clowns surrounding a brightly coloured ‘big top’. We have all had a turn bringing home the ‘writing bag’. Every night somebody brought this home and composed a little story. Our stories were then displayed on our ‘writing wall’. We have been combining our Irish and Music lessons and learned a great little tune called ‘Is Buchaill Bó Mise’. It is a very lively fun song and so as not to leave the girls out, we added another verse ‘is Cáilin Bó Mise’.
We now look forward to our school tour to Loughrea and hope it is a nice sunny day so that we can all have fun in the sun!
Junior and Senior Infants have been working very hard since their return from their Christmas break!
We had great talks about the gifts we got for Christmas and how different they are now to long ago. We looked at pictures of rocking horses, spinning tops, dolls houses and other things! We compared them to toys of today. We cannot imagine having no playstations or Bratz Dolls! But the toys of long ago did look cool.
We then looked at what people wore long ago. How funny that was! The women wore big hats and big dresses and the men wore stockings to their knees! This was very strange indeed! The girls in junior and senior infants all enjoyed drawing pictures of the women in their big colourful dresses!
For Valentines Day, we made lovely cards for our Mams and Dads. We stuck some pasta shells and rice to card in the shape of a love heart. We then painted the heart red. We hope you all loved your Valentines gift!
In science, we did a really cool experiment. With all the rain we have been having lately, we decided to talk about things that are and are not waterproof! We came to the conclusion that you should not wear the following when it is raining: a paper hat, a denim coat, a linen coat and even wool! We feel sorry for all the sheep when it is raining! Their woolly coats must get really wet. We discovered that plastics, rubber gloves and tin foil are all waterproof but we think we will just wear our raincoats and wellies when it rains! We mite look funny going around with rubber gloves or tinfoil on our heads!!!
The count down is on! Mr. Claus is very busy getting his reindeer ready and loading presents onto this sleigh!
The boys and girls in junior and senior infants have been very good this year and have helped to decorate our classroom for Christmas.
Everybody took turns in helping to put up our crib, decorating it with beautiful stars.
We learnt lots of Christmas songs (Little Donkey being one of our favourites) and made lots of colourful Christmas cards. We wish everybody a very happy Christmas – hope Santa comes!
Junior and Senior Infants are working very hard while also preparing for Halloween! We made masks and decorated our classroom using spiders, pumpkins and witches. Our fancy dress Halloween party is on Friday – looking forward to seeing all of the scary costumes!!
Our nature table is full of beautiful Autumn colours. Some children brought in leaves that have changed colour and chestnuts from the horse chestnut tree.
We welcome all our new Junior Infants to school. They look so lovely in their new uniforms.
Settling in can be fun. We had a walk about the school to discover all its exciting areas and meet all the people who work in the school.
Senior infants are so proud of their organic garden which has carrots, parsley, broccoli, cauliflower, onions, leeks, raspberries, strawberries and apples growing. We will have a great harvest. Maybe we might sell some of our produce!!
We welcome Miss Michelle Flannery to our teaching staff and wish Miss Browne luck as she awaits the birth of her new baby.
We would like to thank Miss Nicola Allen for all her hard work and great ideas. Nicola has been with us on teaching practice for the last three weeks. We have no doubt Nicola will make a great primary school teacher and wish her all the best for the future.
We were so sad when Mrs. Bernie Malynn passed away. She was a lovely woman and a great Mammy. We hope she is happy in Heaven.
Junior and senior infants are busy sowing, watering and tending their plants for the garden. We have sown runner beans, marigolds, tomatoes, petunia, pansies, sweet peas and carrots. We are now putting our plants outdoors during the day to acclimatise them to colder weather. We are also getting window boxes made so we can plant our flowers.
TIP for sowing seeds: Fill the inside of a toilet roll with compost and seeds. When the plants grow and become strong, you can then plant them (toilet roll and all) into the ground! It saves you buying pots and you are also recycling the cardboard from your toilet roll!
We are glad that we have our water outside to assist us watering during this lovely weather.
We are learning about water safety near water, especially now that the holidays are approaching and we are swimming.
Did you see us on the television for Celebrity Bainisteoir? We are delighted some of the team came to visit us in the school. We had flags and buntings and we sang for them. They were telling us all about the time they spent in Ardnagrath as young boys. We are looking forward to the final on 16th May. It will be great fun. So, best of luck lads. Up Maryland!
Spring is now here! We have been busy colouring in daffodils and making lambs for our spring display. We also made lovely cards for Valentines Day for our mammies and daddies. We hope they liked them!
Materials and Change is our science topic for this term. We are currently exploring and testing materials to see if they are waterproof or not. However, our favourite experiment this month was turning water into ice …. as we make our very own ice lollies!!!
We did a project on the farm and farm animals. We all wrote about a different animal and got pictures of them. Then put them on the wall. We made a farm using toy farm animals. Later in the year, we will visit a farm to see the animals.
Bhí bricfeasta againn ar scoil. Bhí sport againn:
An Bia Chlár
Deoch oraiste
*****
Calóga Abhair
*****
Ispíní
Slisiní
Ubh friocht
Arán doíte
*****
Cupan tae
We had a great Christmas concert. We were witches, fairies and skeletons. We said poems and sang songs. It was great fun being on stage!