We have been working hard on our story writing over the past few weeks. First, we read a famous fairy tale, Little Red Riding Hood. Next, we created story maps to help us to remember the story. After practising saying it aloud with actions, we then wrote the story for our write portfolios and made mini books for our library. After that, we got really creative and changed the story to create new ones! Each of us created our own fairy tales that follow a similar structure to Little Red Riding Hood but have totally new characters. They are super interesting stories and we are very proud of ourselves!

In Learn Together, we have been learning about age equality. We have been finding out how age can create barriers to equality and we have been learning about different people and organisations who support older people. We learned all about the organisation called Alone and we interviewed Aoife, one of our sixth class teachers, about her work as a volunteer for Alone. She visited our classroom and we asked her lots of questions about who she worked with and how she got involved. She was very inspirational and now we are thinking of different ways that we can help elderly people in our community. 

We have been having fun with painting in our classroom. We tried out some drip art and created colourful rainbow rain showers. We also made some mountain peaks with a limited palette of two primary colours and white. Our challenge was to make each peak a different colour.  

We are learning about data in maths and have started gathering information and making our own graphs. Check out our block graphs representing the pets in our class. 

We have been so busy in our classroom over the last few weeks! We are having fun with our learning and getting better at working cooperatively in pairs and teams. 

We have been learning about Dublin city during our Geography lessons and we combined our learning with some fun drama. We pretended to be tour guides on a Dublin tour bus giving lots of fun facts and information about the city.

We have been practising our different football skills during our P.E. lessons including dribbling, shooting, defending and tackling.

During our Maths lessons, we learned about the different types of lines including horizontal, vertical and parralel lines. We decided to do some line art after learning so much about lines. We made these cool optical illusions. We used straight lines to create a curve. It was so much fun. 

In our classroom, sometimes we work independently and other times we work in pairs and in groups as part of a cooperative team. We have been practising some strategies to help with our teamwork. We use Rally Coaching when working in pairs. One person speaks about their learning and the other person coaches and checks that they are doing each step correctly and then they praise the person who is learning. After that, we swap so that everyone gets a chance to be the coach and the student. We used this strategy with our Buddy Reading and with our Maths. Check out our pictures. 

In Science, we learned all about how the lungs work in the body. We found out facts and wrote some information in our copies. We also brought in plastic bottles and Martha gave us balloons so that we could make a model of the lung. The top balloon acts as the mouth and lungs and the bottom balloon is like the diaphragm. When we pulled the bottom balloon down (the diaphragm) it allows the top balloon (the lung) to fill with air.

This week we have been doing lots of painting. We looked at the abstract paintings of Wassily Kandisnky and were inspired. Last year we painting concentric circles like Kandinsky's famous painting. This time, we used the same idea but innovated it. First, we painted other 2D shapes using the same techniques and in our second try we did it with the first initial of our names.