All of the junior infants have begun the Jolly Phonics Programme this fortnight. The boys and girls have now learnt all of the letter sounds in group one-well done everybody! We are focusing on learning only the letter sounds at the moment. We are not yet learning the letter names or how to write the letter. The Jolly Phonics Programme teaches each sound using a corresponding action to help the children remember them all. The actions are explained in your child's sound copy, which is kept in their homework folder. You could revise the sounds using the jolly jingles, which are available on Youtube. I would also recommend downloading the Jolly Phonics app, as it is free at the moment and is easy to use.

The Jolly Phonics Programme does not follow alphabetic order. This is to allow the children to begin sounding out and building words as soon as possible. If you have any questions please feel free to ask me, I would be happy to help in any way I can. 
​Ms. Shiel

We have been very busy since returning to school two weeks ago! The boys and girls settled back quickly into our school routine and have been learning about school for our Aistear topic. We have been looking at pictures from schools in the past and searching for clues about life long ago. We also went on a tour of our school and learnt the names of the different staff and places in the school. We have been reading our big book, Goldilocks and the three Bears, and have been acting out the story in the role play area and in the small world area during Aistear time. 
We have been learning about sound in science and music. We practised playing instruments on Friday and experimented with making loud/quiet noises and high/low sounds.The boys and girls from room 4 even visited us for our dancing raisins experiment during science week. We have been working very hard!
Thank you to all of the parents for helping the boys and girls with homework and our new phonics work.

We had a lot of fun celebrating Halloween in our room!   Our Aistear role play area was a costume shop, so the boys and girls have had lots of practice using their new vocabulary during playtime. We read lots of Halloween books and learned spooky songs such as "5 Little Witches" and "Who's afraid of Halloween?". We also dressed up on the last school day of October. Visitors came to read us stories about witches! We sang our songs in the hall- it was a very exciting experience.

After learning all about pumpkins, we painted and decorated pumpkins in art! The pumpkins looked wonderfully creative-well done room 14!