Wow! What an exciting couple of months we have had! We have so much news!

We moved in to our new school and our new classroom in January and we love it! On our first day we had a special ribbon cutting ceremony and then got to explore. Since then, we been enjoying settling in and have been busy decorating and displaying our learning.

In January, we went on a school trip to the National Portrait Gallery in Dublin City. We went to the gallery so that we could see a piece of art that was created by one of the children in First Class! She entered an art competition and won and so her work was displayed in the gallery for a number of months. We were all really impressed with her work when we saw it! We are very proud of her! In the gallery, we met a lady called Valerie. Valerie showed us around the gallery and talked to us about the paintings. We learned a lot about portraits and since then have been working on creating some of our own portraits. It was a great day!

In January, we had our last visit from the mobile library for this school year. We loved having the library visit our school and made some thank you cards for the librarians to show our appreciation.

We have been doing lots of learning in our new classroom. In Maths, we have been working cooperatively to learn about place value. 

We have been learning all about bia (food) during our Gaeilge lessons. We've been working in pairs to practise speaking. 

,We have been studying some Irish myths and lessons during history. We focussed on the story "How Cuchulainn got his Name." We made shields during our art lessons so that we could act out some of the story during our drama lessons. When we knew the story really well, we made comics retelling it. 

We've been working hard on our reading in school. We love doing buddy reading. During buddy reading, we each have a buddy to work with. We find a comfortable place to sit, we make sure that we can both see the book and then we take it in turns to read. 

Over the midterm break, we all worked very hard on our home learning task. We each created bird feeders using materials that we found around our houses. The projects are so good that our teacher is going to enter them in a local competition! We presented our birdfeeders to our classmates. Then we wrote letters inviting Caitriona to come and see them. She came to our classroom last Friday and looked at every single one. She was very impressed at both our letter writing skills and our crafting skills! 

What a great start to 2020!

We have been having loads of fun and doing lots of learning this autumn in 1st Class.

In our Maths lessons, we learned all about data representation. We carried out surveys and created a number of different graphs to show our data. Have a look at our block graphs that show the most popular activities in our class during our weekly Golden Time.

We also learned about 2D shapes. As part of our learning, we created monsters using 2D shapes. First we designed our monsters by drawing them and then we built them using colourful paper. 

During our SPHE and Learn Together lessons, we have been learning about our feelings and our wonderful qualities. We created these art pieces to describe ourselves.

In History, we learned about traditional Irish cottages. We learned the parts of the cottage and what materials were used to build them. We also learned all about the festival of Halloween and its traditions. We carved a class pumpkin and created our own Halloween decorations.

We have been doing lots and lots of art projects. Have a look at our self portraits and our scratch art pictures. We created our scratch art pictures by first colouring a blank page with bright crayon, then painting it black and finally scratching off the black paint once it had dried.

We have been doing lots of writing during our English and Irish lessons and have been enjoying sharing our work with our friends in the class.

In our Science lessons, we learned about the hedgehog. We found out lots of information about hedgehogs and made our own hedgehogs using our hand prints to create the spines.

What a great term so far!