This coming month, we will be focusing particularly hard on Maths - including playing lots of Maths games to improve our numeracy skills.
At home, it is so important that the children practice their tables every night. At this stage, many of the children have a reasonable recall of their times tables, but many of them could improve on their speed. Each Friday morning, we have a tables test, and I would love to see everybody improve on their personal best speed this month.
I find it is easiest for a child to improve their speed if they focus on one group of tables at a time - that is why we went back to x3 at the start of the year and we have built from there. If your child does not yet have all of the x3 tables on the tip of their tongue, please go back and start there with them again. Only when they have mastered x3, should you move on to x4. 
There are some ideas on this page to support you and your child with practicing tables as often as possible. 
Enjoy!

Last week, we were lucky to have a virtual visit from a historian - Leon's Dad! Our focus this month was on Medieval history, and Leon's Dad Maciek knows lots about the time period, so he offered to have a Zoom call with us.
Before our call with Maciek, we did some reading and talking about Medieval times, so that we had a basic understanding. Maciek then brought the period to life for us, with a brief talk about some interesting aspects of life at that time.
He referred to a map of Europe quite frequently, as he explained what came before the Middle Ages, and the conquests that took place during the period - with special mentions for the Vikings and Normans.
We were so grateful to him, particularly for his patience in answering all of our questions! At first, we were a little shy, but once we got going, we had an endless supply of questions!
Thank you so much, Maciek, for sharing some of your knowledge with us. No doubt, we will be in touch with you again later in the year. We are so lucky to have an expert parent in our midst!

Last week was Science Week in our class. Tallaght Library usually offer for classes to visit them and take part in Science activities. This year, because of COVID, that wasn't an option. Instead, they put together packs to send out to teachers, and videos explaining the different experiments we could try.
The theme of the pack we got was 'Mysterious Microbes' - very apt as we were learning all about how easily viruses and bacteria can spread, how they multiply, and what we can do to try to protect ourselves.

We got a UV light, and used glow in the dark products to represent germs. In the above experiment, we mixed glow in the dark powder with moisturiser and rubbed it into our hands.
Later, we washed our hands as well as we could, and checked whether we had gotten rid of all the 'germs'/ glow powder.
We also checked whether we had contaminated some of our belongings with the 'germs'. This was really effective.