Ms. Collins

Jolly June!

Our days are numbered here in Room 8. We pop a balloon each morning to count us down until June 28th. Inside each balloon is a question that asks us to reflect on our year in St John's. We are sometimes so busy having fun to remember how far we have come since September!!

The month of June is no exception - we have been exceptionally busy this month with lots of trips around the county!! We have been here, there and everywhere!!! Take a look.....

Our trip to the Fire Station was a huge hit! Thanks to George for organising it for us!

With the help of Mr Morgan, our woodwork teacher, we made some fairy doors for the Greenway. Try and spot them if you go for a cycle over the summer! (Clue: they are near the tunnel in Durrow....but shhhhh!)

The annual Greenway trip was a huge success! We are "wheelie" good cyclists in Room 8 ;)

Two of our boys were selected to play in a soccer tournament hosted by St Johns. They won the tournament, bringing home lovely trophies to show us. We are so proud of them. Well done to the St Johns team.

We were invited out to Carriglea to visit their new Woodland Walk. We had a ball! We got to taste and smell some of the plants growing, pet the donkeys, search for frogs, visit the church, make wishes in the well, crawl through tunnels, creep past sleeping giants, make some music......WHEW! How did we fit it all in?!!

Father's Day Art to say thank you to all of the people who look after us and care for us!

We tried our hand at some crazy golf down in Clonea....I was impressed! Could there be a St John's Golf Team in the future??

Oh hey, May!

Is it really May already? It feels like we have only just come back after our Easter break!! Time is flying by and it's going to be June before we know it. That means we are trying to squash in as much work as possible this month.

Our May themes were "The Zoo" and "Transport".

First, we learned all about the zoo and it's animals: the types of enclosures they live in, the sounds you would hear if you worked as a zoo-keeper and so on. This brought us to designing and planning our very own zoos. The trickiest part some of us found was deciding which zoo animals could be neighbours or not...it's all politics if you ask us!! Bonus points awarded to the zoo-architects who remembered to include toilet facilities and coffee shops!

Paint pattern study using marbles! Lots of fun :)

Hands-down, the highlight of our zoo study was our trip to the zoo in Ms. Wall's class. It was OUT OF THIS WORLD!! We got tickets at the door, there were animal sounds all around us on different speakers. We had a check-list to try and spot as many zoo animals as we could. There was even a gift shop - WE WERE IN OUR ELEMENT!! (Ms Collins included!!) It really was the real deal and all of us from Room 8 would like to thank everyone from Ms Wall's Room for their hard work and creativity that took weeks to put together!!! We loved it!

No monkey-business during our drawing class! How better to learn about animal anatomy than to draw it!

Transport Theme - we enjoyed learning all about vehicles and transport in May. Have a look....

Our new school bus is finally in action and we are able to get out and about to learn outdoors! How lucky are we?! We chose Mahon Falls as our first destination and we also took a spin out to the Cunnigar and to Helvick.

In the middle of all the fun this month was the Cork City Sports Day! A great day out was had by all!

With all the warm weather this month, we have been making healthy fruit snacks to cool us down! Delicious smoothies and sorbet! Oh la la!

Fun in the sun with our friends :)

Our green schools efforts have taken us outside the school railings this month to tidy up the area outside our school! We are very proud of our efforts each week.

Yoga-masters in the making. We are trying something new for the next 8 weeks. Yoga is a big hit with Room 8!

April is Awesome!

April has been such an AMAZING month!! It has been full of activities for Easter so we have been very busy! We haven't spent much time in the classroom this month. We're trying to get out and be active in our learning as much as we can. Here's a sneak peak at what we've been upto....

Easter egg hunts!!

EGG-CELLENT experiments to see which material would be best to protect Humpty Dumpty from his very high fall off the balcony! Our predictions were waaaay off and we had some very interesting results....

A special trip to McDonald's with Ms. Whelan's class!

Fun and games in the playground!

We got our hands dirty helping to prepare the soil for sowing potatoes

We also checked in on our peas to see how they're coming along...

Cinema trip to see "Dumbo"! We had a fantastic time!

We made some pretty snazzy Easter baskets to collect our eggs in!

Colour mixing art to learn about the primary colours - red, yellow and blue

April is National Spring Clean Month. So we made an extra effort to do our bit to keep the school clean over the Easter break

Easter baking - we made marshmallow Easter nests and mini-egg rocky road!

Some Mother's Day art from last month!

Magical March 🍀

March has been another speedy month! Time flies when you’re having fun and that’s exactly what we’ve been doing in Room 8!!

Our themes for March were, "Ireland - St. Patrick's Day" and "Spring".

St Patrick's Day arts and crafts were in full swing...

Inspired by Celtic knots and patterns from long long ago in Ireland, we decided to write our names using the old style of lettering similar to the letters in the Book of Kells.

Oh man!! If Ms Collins had known just how tricky it was to make slime she never would have promised it to everyone! If at first you don't succeed try and try again...and again and AGAIN! Oh dear! Multiple recipes later, we finally made some St Patrick's Day slime just in time for the big day! PHEW!

Here we are putting our best foot forward for a little céilí on "Irish Day". It was so much fun!! Thank you to Ms Moore and everyone involved in organising a great morning of song and dance.

Our St. Patrick's Parade was so much fun! Our class dressed up as a leprechaun rock band "The Sham-rockers", we marched around the hall, handed out some leprechaun jokes and offered treats to the parade spectators! We really enjoyed taking part!

Just incase you thought we were too busy to do any work this month!!

Moving onto our second theme of the month, "Spring" - what do you think of our lovely Spring Bunnies?

We wrote some lovely Spring Poems about lambs and daffodils.

With all the lovely weather we've been having this month, our P.E lessons have made the big move outdoors!!

Little Green Fingers!! Spring time means......Its back to the poly-tunnel to prepare for another planting season!! We planted some Irish Peas and beetroot, we helped to rake, make drills and water the soil. Thanks to Sue for showing us the ropes!

We made our own magnifying glasses and brought them with us on a "Spring Hunt"! We're taking every opportunity we can to enjoy this lovely Spring weather. It's fantastic!! Can you spot any signs of Spring??

We also had TWO very special birthdays to celebrate in Room 8 this month - that's no bother to us! We love to party!! Happy Birthday Kaylan and Darragh!

February Fun!

February has been a FAST month so far for all of us here in Room 8.

Our themes for the month were 'Friendship/Valentines' and 'The Senses'.

We did A LOT of role play on "Friendship". We looked at all of the fantastic things we do for each other in Room 8 to be a good friend. On the other hand it was very important that we also spent time focusing on some of the things that aren't so nice that we sometimes do to each other. We decided to make a chart to remind us how we should behave.

Our friendship chain. "The only way to have a friend is to be one".

Before we knew it, it was time to decorate our classroom for St. Valentine's Day!

We made some Kandinsky inspired love-hearts. It was good practice trying not to mix the paints into one big brown mush!! They turned out beautiful!

A feel good afternoon!! One lovely activity we did to celebrate our class friendships was make "Compliment clouds". Everyone got a turn to sit on the "best friend throne" and listen to all of the fantastic reasons why we think that they're a good friend. We picked our favourite compliments that our friends gave us and used them to create our "compliment clouds". We have our clouds proudly on display in class to remind us just how special we are!

We took off on a trip to town to spend our savings! First stop - the post office for some stamps. Then onto Eurogiant to pick out some lovely Valentine's cards for someone special!! (turns out Mammy and Daddy aren't the only lucky ones this year!!) Keep an eye out for the postman - there could be a special delivery! xxx

We are still keeping up with our trips to the library. We try to go once a week if the weather allows! The library is a fantastic resource for us to have so nearby to school. We don't know how lucky we are!! We just love browsing the books and sitting down to enjoy them.

February treats as sweet as us!! Chocolate fudge brownies just in time for Valentines Day!

Valentine's art in the making...

We really enjoyed exploring our senses this month. Touch, taste, sight, hearing and smell - so many senses so little time!! Here is a taster of some of the activities we did to help us explore our senses.

We learned all about the different parts of our tongue that detect different tastes. After tasting some sweet, salty, sour and bitter foods, we did a blind taste test to try and recognise different fruits and to decide if they were sweet, sour, salty or bitter! It was lots of fun! Miss Collins was sorry that she didn't bring in more foods to try!!

That's all for February - check back next month to see what we learn about next!!

Jolly January!

Welcome back everyone, hope you had a lovely Christmas! We were just so delighted here in Room 8 to catch up after the holidays and to see our friends again. We have had a new pupil join us this month which has been very exciting! It’s going to be a FANTASTIC term! Check out all of our monthly adventures on this page.

Our first theme for January was ‘Winter'. This was a lovely topic to get back to work with. We were able to tie it into lots of SESE, maths and literacy activities.

As part of our ‘Winter’ theme, we studied the animals of the Arctic and the Antarctic. We made penguins and polar bears during art. In drama we imagined what it was like for the polar bear waking up after hibernation. We investigated the insulating effects of blubber in science and we used our new learning about arctic seals to help us revise sentence structures! Wow we have been busy!!

It was straight back to routine this month! No slacking! Here we are working hard during morning workstations. Our morning workstations give us a chance to work independently to improve our literacy and numeracy skills.

This month we were very busy in the kitchen - but that’s nothing new!! Just check out the photos below to see some of our tasty treats!

Some of our artwork this month! Mixing, folding, cutting, curling, sticking....

P.E time - time to build up our core strength, balance and coordination skills.

Our second theme for January was “Toys”. We had a lot of fun exploring this theme as you can imagine!! Our favourite activities were making toy collages for different age groups and setting up our own toy shop in class.

We started by comparing toys from the past and now.

Next up - we got our hands on some toy catalogues from Toymaster. With these catalogues we had to compare and discuss which toys would be suitable for a baby, a toddler, a 10 year old etc. We were verrrry tempted to clean out our savings to buy something nice from the catalogue!!!

Welcome to the Room 8 Toy Shop! How can we help?

We brought in some toys for show and tell. We had everything from teddies to transformers to tablets!! Everyone took turns to present their toy to the class.

December is here full of cheer!!

December has finally arrived - Christmas chaos has taken over in Room 8! Have a look at what we’ve been upto....

We’ve had TWO birthdays this month in Room 8! Double the birthdays means double the cake...YUM!

Christmas preparations started with the tree. Darragh was very lucky to be chosen to put the angel at the top of our school Christmas tree - isn’t our tree lovely? We also made Christmas tree countdown calendars to mark off the days until Christmas. Every day we move our star closer and closer - by December 25th our stars will be at the top of our trees!

Just like Santa’s elves we have still been working hard in class this month! We have been revising all our phonics sounds and blends that we have done so far this term. When we learn or revise a letter we practice writing lots of different ways, we play phonics games, we sing songs and listen to stories about that letter. Can you spot which letters these busy elves have been working on this month?

We have done lots of art this month - painting, mixed media collages, cutting, sticking, photography, colouring with pencils, crayons, markers, chalk, sponge painting, constructions......you name it! We’ve done it!

Christmas Maths: One of our maths topics this month has been learning about how to write numbers in different ways. During one of our maths activities we counted the number of letters in everyone’s name and showed this number using pictures. It was a nice change from our usual maths work!

Another skill we reviewed this month was how to count and show numbers using tally marks. We made a tally chart to see which foods most of us would be eating on Christmas Day!

Christmas is the perfect time to review making good choices and here in Room 8 we thought what better way to do that than writing out all of the things we need to do to be on the NICE list! (Although we were still pretty good at knowing what behaviors are on the “naughty” list!) . It turned out to be a very interesting writing activity!!!!

Christmas fun is never ending!

We went on a scavenger hunt around the school trying to catch the Gingerbread Man! We were very good at finding clues... It was so much fun!

Silly Miss Collins left all her Christmas wrapping until the last minute - lucky we’re expert wrappers in Room 8!

We were FANTASTIC in our Christmas show!

Train ride at Winterval

We all sat down to the most delicious Christmas dinner together! It was a wonderful occasion for us all to come together before the holidays!

November

Cookery was lots of fun this month. We made scones, apple and blackberry crumble and hot chocolate! Yum!

We have been working on throwing and catching skills in P.E

Artists at work!! We created water colour resist paintings of the hot chocolate we made - they look so good you can almost taste them!

We were learning about different occupations this month as our theme. Our class really enjoyed acting out different roles and exploring all of the different jobs they can have when they grow up!

Rainy days call for rainy artwork

October

October was a busy month! Our themes for October were "Autumn" and "Halloween".

We enjoyed delicious pancakes cooked for us as part of the Cheerios Breakfast morning fundraiser. It was such a treat!

On the Thursday before the Halloween break, we all dressed up to walk to town to watch the Witches Walk! We were very frightening!! Check out some of our costumes!

We changed our science class for the week into a potions class. We made up spells to chant as we made exploding witches brew using bone dust and zombie juice. Lots of fun was had!

September

We would like to welcome all our new students this year! Everyone has settled in wonderfully and we have wasted no time in getting back to work!!!

Our daily wake and shake kicked off with the very popular 'Baby Shark' song. Each day children are becoming more and more confident with their dancing and it is wonderful to hear that everyone at home is joining in with the singing and dancing!!! (sorry parents!!)