Welcome to the webpage for Junior and Senior Infants. Here we will keep you up to date on class news and post some work from the children.
In September we will look at the theme of birthdays. The children will be making decorations, cakes and cupcakes, singing and playing party games.
Art
We made borders for our name mosaic art, using A4 paper and chalk. We blended the different colours together to make new colours.
We created self portraits using paper, pencils and pens. We cut and stuck strips for our background.
Fine motor skills:
We use playdoh a lot! It helps to make out hands and fingers strong, and helps get us ready for writing. We made snowmen and made outfits for them!
SPHE:
We read the story ‘The Colour of Happy.’ The children used colour to describe different feelings and wrote about their own experiences with these feelings.
Outdoor learning:
Sometimes we spent the afternoons in the garden. We have lots of wildflowers including poppies, cornflowers and sunflowers. We will learn how to save the seeds from the flowers, so we can even more next year. These flowers are really important for bees and other pollinating insects.
The children use playdoh to make their hands and fingers strong. Leah made a snake with features. The Juniors learn SO much from the big Senior Infants in their class!
Welcome to our new children!
Myself and Caroline had a busy first day at school; it was so lovely seeing all the new (and not so new) faces! We played some games with Ms Kavanagh, sang songs, had a chat and told each other about the Summer holidays.
Phonics and blending: Junior Infants
Phonics bloom: There are loads of great games on this site (pick Phase 1 and 2 for Junior Infants, Phase 3 upwards for Senior Infants)
Sentence scramble: This is more for Senior Infants, where they rearrange mixed up words to make a sentence.
Fine motor skills: Below is a blog with ideas for helping your child develop fine motor skills in fun ways. There are lots of other blogs on Pinterest.
We care for each other in our class.
Useful website for Junior and Senior Infants
For some great websites for Junior Infants, click here:
May in our class
We are looking at living things in our school environment. We went on a minibeast hunt and found worms, slugs, ants, spiders and woodlice.
We used magnifying containers to study them
April in our class
ART: We have been looking at using fabric and fibre in art this month. We have been focussing on birds this month in our class so we linked this into our Art lessons. We had great fun making our birds and practised weaving onto the card.
We also made fabric flower pots 
We used recycled card, felt, wool and sticks to make our birds
Making our rolled up flowers was not easy but we kept going and think they look beautiful!
Fruit feast!
We listened to the story Handa’s Surprise. We tasted most of the fruit in the story. We were very brave and tried lots of new fruit; mango, pineapple, plums, pears, bananas, melon, avocado and tangerines.
March in our class
We made suet bird feeders!
We planted wildflower seeds
We learned about trees
We made shadow art using chalk!
Easter egg hunt!
Back to school!
We are so happy to be back in school with all of our friends. Our caretaker Harry made a beautiful bench to surround our tree.
The children have been working SO hard with remote learning. Many thanks to them for their efforts and to their parents for all of their help and support.
February in our classroom
January in our classroom
December in our classroom
We put up our Christmas decorations. Caoilainn put the star on the top!
We were looking at the theme of Day and Night. We looked at nocturnal animals and made owls.
We have learned so many sounds! We make a collage of each sound twice a week.
We have been using Khan Academy kids app on the iPads. We love playing logic games on Math Playground.
We are looking at a Winter theme in AISTEAR this month. The children made their own homemade snow. They are using a variety of materials to make people and structures in their village.
We wrote a letter to Santa, asking him to stay safe.
November in our classroom
The junior infants are starting to write numbers now. We can practice them using the pegboards, then our whiteboards and finally our maths copies!
We have been looking at different types of vehicles this month. We carried out a traffic survey to link in with recording data in numeracy.
We made collage portraits using a variety of different media: photographs, paper, glitter, pencil and paint. We used lots of different techniques: resistance painting, printing, cutting and sticking. We think they look lovely!
We have been looking at what it means to be a good friend, using the Stay Safe programme. Ava did a beautiful picture.
We looked at the different parts of a plant. We did some weeding in the garden and were able to identify the leaf, stem, petals and roots.
We use playdoh a lot to develop our fine motor skills. Oisin made a skeleton!
We did a construction challenge to see which pod could build the tallest tower, using paper cups, in 3 minutes. It was very difficult but lots of fun.
October in our classroom
We had great fun dancing with Miss Harris this week. She taught us some scary moves to go with the Ghostbusters song. We performed it in the yard and made a video. It is on the homepage.
We gathered natural materials and made some pieces of land art. The weather was pretty windy though, so we didn’t get any photos!
The boys made a caterpillar
Alisha is our in-house hairdresser, so was able to plait the leaf stems!
We have been looking at land art. We made a big circle out of fallen leaves.
We rolled a marble around a box filled with glitter and paint to make a painting.
We looked at different types of weather in October. Conor is our weatherman each day.
We use the Smartboard and Maths Playground to play Logic games. The children completed some of these puzzles for Homework on Google Classroom this month.
We went on a leaf hunt. We were able to find leaves from the Oak, Hawthorne, Sycamore, Holly and Rowan trees.
September in our classroom
Numeracy:
We used a variety of 2-D shapes to copy and then make our own puzzles.
PE:
The children are looking at different ways of travelling, and each pod designed an assault course using sidewalk chalk.
GAA training is back!
Training started back for all classes last week, we really enjoyed our session with David.
Engaging with Nature: Rearing Caterpillars
We are keeping caterpillars in our classroom this month and made a home-made caterpillar habitat. Thanks to the children who brought them in! We will be able to see the caterpillar change to a butterfly.
We made caterpillars, using natural objects like leaves and twigs. When it was done with threw all our materials back into the garden!
We went on a leaf hunt! We found lots of different leaves of native Irish trees, including sycamore, oak, Hawthorn and Rowan trees.
We went on a leaf hunt! The children searched for leaves from native Irish trees including Hawthorn, Oak, Sycamore and Rowan trees. We then made leaf rubbings from the different leaves.
Art: land art constructions
We are developing our fine motor skills each morning, to warm us up and prepare us for writing.
We use the iPads to help us practice letter formation, and both junior and senior infants practice writing their names every day.
Lining up safely in the yard
We walk like Superman, to help us give each other space when walking.
Our first week at school
The garden got a little overgrown during the holidays, so we did some weeding with Ms Parle. It looks a lot better now!
We saved some seeds
We saved seeds from cornflowers, poppies, marigolds and scabiosa. We will plant them for the bees in March.
