As part of our distance learning in January, our focus in our Learn Together lessons has been on Children's Rights. We learned all about the UNCRC and the National Children's Strategy, both of which were designed to promote and protect children's rights. 
We used padlet to record our thoughts on how life has improved for children in Ireland since the drawing up of the UNCRC and the establishment of the National Children's Strategy.
We will go on to learn about some children in Ireland whose rights are perhaps not being respected as well as they should be, as they and their families live in Direct Provision.
So we first needed to learn about Migration, push and pull factors, and what might cause children and their families to leave their home countries as Refugees. We used Jamboard to brainstorm our ideas on this.

This week, the children have been really busy at home coming up with all kinds of creative creations! They have been submitting them on Seesaw and we have enjoyed looking through them in class. Drawings, poetry, writing, origami, music, construction - it's been really impressive!
In school, we had our first foray into photography, as we used the classroom cameras for the first time. Needless to say, it was very exciting getting to take photographs, so we had 'free play' with the cameras - getting used to how to take and delete pictures. Over the coming weeks, we will develop our abilities with the cameras and ultimately photograph children from Junior Infants for a photography project.

As a final, wrap-up activity on the reading of The Budgie Diaries, we were lucky to have a video call with Fionnuala, the author of the book, today. Fionnuala was really impressed with all the work we did in our mini-books!

​We all had so many questions to ask her, so we voted at our tables to select a shortlist of questions.

It was so exciting to meet Fionnuala - she was really friendly and fun. And she finally answered some of the questions we have been dying to know the answers to!