This week the focus was on letter formation. We are working hard and the children are really showing steady progress. 

The children always enjoy learning through song. Here we are practicing our irish. 

We also did some more exploring weight. The children are becoming really familiar with the concept of weight and we had some interesting discussions how we should sort objects around the room into order according to their weight. Lightest to heaviest. We also learnt that bigger doesn't away mean heavier.

This week marked the end of the month's topics. We had great fun learning about Winter, clothes, the Artic and weight and lots else. But we're excited to move onto all things new too. Below are a selection of fun videos of the children playing. Enjoy!

Homework was excellent as always. Great to see the children working so hard on their numbers and adding interesting patterns to their colouring. Well done everyone! 

To finish off this week's blog I am delighted to be able to show you a little video that really shows just how fantastic each and every child in my class is. I was extremely proud of how they managed to perform this PE exercise to such an excellent  standard. They do you proud moms and dads!

It was lovely to see all the moms and dads at the PTMs on Monday. I am glad to hear that your little ones are so happy in school. That's all any of us want for our children. Next month we will be moving onto the topic of 'Transport'... if anyone has any old toy cars, busses, boats, trains, airplanes etc I would greatly appreciate them to add to our play. That's it for this week. Have a great weekend.

Kind Regards,
Ms Murray

Our focus for this week was learning about how the Inuit people live. We are really enjoying our very own igloo in our classroom and managed to do a little fishing for our shape fish in the water hole. 

The girls and boys are doing some great role-play in preparation for their Aistear play. We watched some examples of shop role-play on you tube and then had a good ourselves. Well done girls! 

Busy Shop!

For the past few months we have made an extra special effort to allow a ten minute slot each day for Drop Everything and Read (DEAR). This is a time where the children have free choice to read books that relate to the current topic (our local library are very good, Maria gives us a great selection each month to match our topic). The children love to curl up in any snug space they can find to enjoy their book alone or with a friend.  

The Food Dudes has got off to a really great start. I am very happy to see that the children are all up for tasting new foods and everyone is getting their stickers and rewards. We even get to add some of the left over fruit and veg to our Aistear play... Mmmm fruit and veg soup! 

Some fun maths games... we played What's Missing? Also we have been learning about weight and all things heavy and light... We added some weighing scales to our play time and collected lots of different objects to weigh. We recorded our findings on our chart.

Working with different fabrics to design outfits.

Early Morning work stations. the focus this week was on letter formation of c and o.

We really enjoyed our art lesson this week. We discussed how we have to draw all our body parts in the right place (head, neck, torso, arms etc.) Next we made a plan of what we would include in our painting. Then we sketch onto our canvas. We discussed paint mixing to make new colours. It was great fun!

Great Homework this week. Here is a FANTASTIC rendition of their homework poem this week. Well done everyone! I was very impressed with how well they knew it. 

I hope you all enjoy this week's blog. I look forward to seeing everyone at the Parent/Teacher meeting on Monday in our classroom (Room 5). Please be prompt and I will do my best to keep to our 10 minute slots. Please knock on the door at your allocated time. 

Have a great Weekend,

Regards,
Ms Murray

Happy new year everyone and welcome back after the Christmas holidays. I hope that you all had a great break and got to spend lots of time with your family and friends. It was lovely to see the children back to school on Monday in such good form. It's always a good sign to see them happy to come to school. We all missed each other lots! 

I was on two training days this week. So my blog will be a little empty of photos and videos unfortunately. But you may like to know that on Wednesday, I was on a training day for the new Food Dudes program that we are going to be taking part in over the coming weeks. We will be sending home more information on this next week, but really it is all about getting your child to try and taste different foods. Click here for more information.

On Thursday we were closed to fallicate our training day for the new language curriculum that is being implemented over the next year. It is an exciting time in education and there are a lot of changes on the horizon in regards to what and how we will teach your child, but like anything new it takes time and patience (and a lot of training and discussion). But you can be rest assured that the new proposals for your child's curriculum education is very exciting and very much in touch with how young children learn and explore new things in their world. It is a very exciting time to be a teacher! Click here to link to the curriculum explained for parents.

So... This week we discussed our new topics for the month, as discussed on the homework sheet. The children are very excited about the proposed igloo. The clothes shop is up and running. and we have lots of other plans for learning through play. Below is a list of things you may have at home that we could use for our Aister. I sent home a sheet on Monday with some of the vocabulary your child should know on the topic of clothes.  We were discussing lot of words for different fabrics. We are also focusing in topical stories. Here are a few links.

We discussed all of Cinderella's different outfits. Click here for the story.

List of things you might have at home for our Aistear:

• small old clothes, shoes, winter scarf etc. (nothing good) 
• anything old Winter themed toys (we will be learning about the artic, Eskimos, igloos, cold weather) 
• Old scraps of material for cutting and creating new outfits for our little dolls (our poor Barbies are getting very cold!) 
• an ice tray
• A bag of bread soda (to make snow experiment) 
• Cotton circles
• Any old wire racks (the kind you have in your oven) for fabric weaving.

Please don't feel any pressure to bring in anything... it's just if you had anything lying around and could spare it. If you're in a position to lend anything that would be great too, just remember to let me know and I will keep it safe and return it at the end of the month.

Below is the only little video I managed to capture this week. I think you'll agree it was a very fitting topic for this week!

Have a lovely weekend,

Regards,
Ms. Murray

p.s. Parent/Teacher Meetings will be held on Monday 22nd January. I will send a note home on Monday with your times.