Room 4 have been improving their maths skills. Ask us to count and add with you at home! Room 4 have been learning GAA skills with coach Gerry from Ballymun Kickhams. Thank you coach Gerry!
We are very busy in room 4 at the moment! We have completed learning all of our Jolly Phonics sounds and have begun blending our word boxes. We have also begun learning our letter formation. Thank you for all of the great support with homework. Please see the video below for tips on blending.
During February, the children are learning all about different modes of transport. Please discuss these with your children at home using our home help sheet. Ask the children to sing our transport song with you!
Please return here for further updates later this month.
Welcome to Room 4's class blog! Check this page for pictures and information about our class. The boys and girls are settling well into Junior Infants and are working very hard! Here are some pictures of our DEAR (Drop Everything And Read) time, aistear work, reading along with teacher to "Owl Babies", pattern activities and our autumn walk with room 5.
Now that the children have been introduced to all 42 sounds, we are starting to move on to reading using our word boxes. The video below may help parents who are unfamiliar with using word boxes. We encourage the children to say the sounds in the word in one breath to help them blend the sounds together.
Here are a few pictures from Aistear this month. Our topics for the month were clothes and the arctic. Below you can see the children painting polar bears, making igloos in construction, playing clothes bingo, playing in our clothes shop, ice fishing in our igloo, drawing/writing at our writing station and sticking outfits to our people posters. The boys and girls had a great time using their new vocabulary this month-well done everybody! Room 14 carried out fantastic work in literacy this month! Below you can see the children reading "The Smartest Giant in Town" along with teacher. We talked about the author, illustrator, cover and blurb. We also discussed the pictures on each page as we read along, and made predictions about what would happen next. We found some of our tricky words in the story too! The children have made great progress with their writing workshop stories, especially now that we can form the letters c, a, o, d and g properly! Below you can see the boys and girls sharing their story with a partner and showing their super listening skills. The children have now been introduced to all 42 Jolly Phonics sounds and we are making great progress on our reading. A big thank you to Ms. Greene who organised some exciting science experiments for us! We investigated how to make a skittle rainbow, how a candle in an upside down glass can rise water and how dry ice can make fog! We had a lot of fun! We discussed and drew our favourite science experiment at the end. We have two Aistear themes this month- clothing and the Arctic. For our clothing role play, we will have a clothes shop. We will also have an Arctic igloo. If you have any children's clothing, penguin/polar bear toys etc. that you could lend to the class until the end of the month they would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!
We were very busy in room 14 in December! Here are a selection of pictures from some of the events that took place last month. The boys and girls enjoyed taking part in the Winter Walk on campus. We worked very hard preparing for our Christmas play. Thank you to all the parents for helping with costumes and learning lines. We practised on the stage, with a pianist and we had a dress rehearsal. The children put on a super show! Thank you to parents who sent in pictures and videos of the play. On the last day of school we had popcorn and enjoyed a screening of our show. It was lovely for the children to see the show from the audience's perspective. One day in December, the class was returning from the hall when a few snowflakes fell! We were all very excited! The snow inspired many creative stories during writing workshop time that day. We covered a lot in school in December. The boys and girls learned about toys in the past in history. You could tell them about your favourite toys when you were a child. We played with some toys from the past at an Aistear station, including Christmas snap, stacking dolls, jenga, dominos etc. We explored magnetism. In maths we carried out work on properties of shapes- in the pictures, the children are working out what the shape could be given the clues and justifying their answers. Parents came in to read Christmas stories to us. We also saw a very funny puppet show!
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 |