13-01-2017

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.

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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.

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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!

Untitled from Zara Murray on Vimeo.

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.