June

MAY

Our themes for May were, Technology and Food.

WE have been learning the rules and skills required for Spikeball for the last few weeks. Children have been amazing at improving their serving skills each week!
After reading the wonderful story by Julia Donaldson called; A squash and a Squeeze, we sang some farm themed songs and activities with Mrs Walls class!
For our technology theme, we read 'When do we use technology?' book. We also had objects of reference that children could use, as we spoke about them. 

For math's we had great fun learning about directions, with the help of our Robot suit and direction signs. We even had some robot dances thrown into the mix!!!
Here we are at our reading stations. We make sure everyone is exposed to shared, paired, individual and teacher led reading each week.
We have started an Interactive Maths Wall. Children get the opportunity to answer addition operations, change the weather, read the time, find the correct month and day. Here is Eoin filling in the daily temperature.
For our next cookery lesson, we made fried cinnamon bananas. They were absolutely delicious and everyone worked very well within their teams!
We had a school Museum with technology artifacts on display. All the teachers really enjoyed listening to children's ideas for what each one was used for! It made us feel very old!!!!
Have a look in the gallery to see pictures of the Cork Sports Day. We had a wonderful day and everyone had great fun! 
The children decided to make a boy and girl robot for our Technology theme. There was great competition from the boys team, however, the girls were far more interested in the jewellery and accessories that they would put on Rosie the Robot!
For cookery, children made spaghette bolognese. 
Here are the children making beautiful 3D flower pictures.
With all this glorious weather, we decided to take our P.E lesson outside.
After learning lots of new fruits in our book, Handa's Surprise, we made a delicious fruit salad using lots of the fruits we read about.
Tucking in at our Summer Barbecue!
We had some winners in the Art competition raising awareness of the work done by IMNDA. The prizes were fantastic and the children were thrilled with their success!

APRIL

Our themes for April were Spring and the farm.

Music plays a big part in our class, so everyday a different child has been helping Mr's Hogan play our morning songs. This month we have been sing 'Rockin all over the world' and 'Springtime'. Along with our daily Wake and Shake, children are alert and enthusiastic for their morning activities.
Children have been helping to plant some beautiful flowers in the garden over the past few weeks. After spotting the vibrant colour's of the tulips in our front garden, we made some beautiful 3D tulip pictures to brighten up our classroom wall.
With the changeable weather lately, we tried to confine he clouds to a bowl in our classroom!!!! Here we are making shaving foam clouds. We were observing what happens when water is poured into the bowl. We made predictions beforehand and recorded our results afterwards
As always, cookery has keep us very busy. We made scrambled eggs, tea and toast and delicious pasta in tomato sauce.
Finally Mr Sun cam out to say hello! It was the perfect opportunity to see all the beautiful colour's that spring brings with her. We recorded all the colour's that we saw around the school. We then drew pictures of our favourite scene.
We had a visit from our local firemen to remind us the importance of fire safety at home and in school. We also got fun fire safety packs to bring home
Here we are painting our farm scene pictures.
Big Week on the Farm 2018 was filmed in Dungarvan this year. For this reason we thought it would be fun to film our very own Big Week on the farm in St John's farm.  As a class, we decided on the characters we would need and then wrote a script based on the ideas we had come up with. We had so much fun making it and it is clear to see that we have some budding actors in Primary 3. Here are some pictures....

MARCH

Our themes fr March were Ireland (St Patrick's Day) and Easter...... his of course meant LOTS of art and crafts!!!!

Here we are making hand print rainbows.
After the snow storm, we made play dough snowmen and wrote pursuasive arguments for snow day fun activities! 
There was serious preparation work for our St Patrick's Day float.

Here we are making collage shamrocks, origami snakes and St Patrick's Day hats.
We also had an irish dancing lesson, to get ourselves ready for dancing through the parade!

Our float was a great success and the whole school had a fantastic time at the parade!
For cookery we made french toast and tea, chocolate leprechaun hats and chocolate nests.
Our Science experiment and Mothers Day craft intertwined this month, when we made Mothers Day bracelets by melting lollypop sticks and manipulating the shape of the sticks.
We went to see Peter Rabbit in the cinema and received some lovely rabbit ears. But we decided to make our own, which were far nicer!! With the other classes, we went on an Easter Egg hunt. It was such fun and everyone was thrilled with their Easter Eggs from the Easter bunny! 

FEBRUARY

Our themes for February were friendship and health. It was also a busy month for celebrations. We enjoyed learning about St Brigid, Lent, Pancake Tuesday and Mother's Day.


​For cooking, we made delicious sausage rolls and strawberry, nutella puffs
We enjoyed hearing stories about St Brigid's cross and her colourful cloak. We also made our own crosses.
With Valentines day approaching, we decided to give the children free reign on their Valentines cards. They turned out great! We also made stunning Love heart pictures using chalk pastels and charcoal.
With our Mothers being so special and doing so much for us, we created heart bouquets for them!
We had Wacky Pancake races, played love heart hop scotch and cupid's arrows for P.E.
Our 'All about  Pancake Day' Powerpoint taught us how different traditions are adopted all over the world. Did you know that not every country eats Pancakes on Shrove Tuesday??? We then created our Pancake recipes.  
For Health we explored how germs can easily pass from one person to the next and also how they can make us sick. Some children researched information about micro organisms on the i pads, recorded them and read to the class. We also made colourful germs information posters.
Our Science experiment got us thinking about the importance of hand washing. We had three slices of bread. One untouched, one touched with dirty hands and one touched with clean hands. They were sealed and put on display. After a few days the dirt and germs began to show on the dirty AND clean hands bread. It made us question how well we wash our hands on a daily basis!
Here we are making 'icky' germs.
Learning the rules and techniques of spikeball was tricky at first, but with continued practice the boys and girls were serving some VERY powerful shots!!!
With so many staff ad students sick with colds  and flu's. We made our own remedy of honey and lemon tea. Surprisingly it was a massive hit aand we even made it again later in the week. 
Clingfilm pattern painting.
We have been listening to a lot of irish music lately in our class. This lead to us watching some videos of Riverdance! The children were anxious to try out some movees off their own!

JANUARY

Our themes for January were Weather and Space

​Parachute Games for P.E
S.P.H.E- We learned how to identify emotions by looking at faces. We also played the emotions board game.
Science Experiment- Identifying hot and cold
Cookery- We made tasty and easy Chocolate mug cakes in the microwave and pineapple pizza muffins!
Seeing as though January has been a bit of a wash out, we created or own windy weather and rainy days paintings using some interesting techniques.
I.T- literacy and maths on the laptops.
Moon sand

DECEMBER

Here are some pictures of what we got up to in December....please look in the gallery to see more lovely photos!

NOVEMBER

OCTOBER

Our themes for October are 'Autumn' and 'Halloween'
We have loved exploring the Seasons and the change in the weather. 
We have been watching the leaves falling from the trees since Autumn began, so we did some leaf rubbings with the colours of Autmn.
We had a wonderful time in the Primary 3 Bowling Alley at P.E time. We even had a few strikes!!!
We went on a Nature Walk to see the changes that Autumn made to our environment. But before we ventured out, we looked at some of the things that we might find on our walk. Look at the beautiful colours that Autumn brings!!!
We were lucky to have a nice dry day for our Autumn Nature Walk. We spotted a lot of seeds and leaves that we had previously looked at. We collected blackberries so that we could make some jam. We had to be mindful not to pick the berries near the ground, as they may have been unsafe to eat. 
Science Experiment time! We were amazed to see, that like magicians, we could make water travel along a piece of string instead of flowing straight down!!!
After washing our blackberries, we made blackberry jam in the kitchen. It was SO easy to make with just sugar, lemon, water and the berries. We thoroughly enjoyed eating our jam on brown bread. 
After seeing the beautiful colours of Autumn during our Nature Walk, We created our own leaf paintings which looked super!
We read 'There was an old woman who swallowed some leaves'. We love the 'old woman' series as they are very funny and the children are great at predicting and sequencing. We worked in groups to complete fun sequencing activities based on the story.
Here we are working very hard at our English stations. 
We have introduced maths games on the computer and i pads this month. The children have loved learning through the use of I.T
We got quite a shock to arrive into our classroom on a Monday morning to find the room completely transformed into an Enchanted Halloween Cavern. 
We decided to carve some pumpkins. But before we did that, we learned about the properties of the pumpkin. We recorded our findings a made a display for the rest of the school to see! We also made some paper pumpkin decorations to brighten up the display.
We had such a wonderful time carving our pumpkins. We scooped out the mushy pulp and seeds. Then, we carefully drew on our pumpkin faces. We used special cutters to cut out the face. Everyone was so sensible when using this equipment. When we finished carving our pumpkins, we had a great sensory experience, playing with mushy pulp from inside the pumpkins. 
Another science experiment we conducted was looking at the effects washing up liquid has on milk. It showed some amazing patterns and we say a lot of movement in our milk trays. We then recorded our results on our Science Record sheets. 
Our Halloween music session was very loud and spooky! We played instruments to accompany the song 'Witches brew'. 
For P.E we got very active by trying to keep our two class ghosts off the ground. We had to work as a team to ensure that everyone helped keep the ghosts fly high! We also had a race to see who could make the best mummy. Using toilet paper we got to wrap the children up!! The children didn't stop giggling throughout this activity and even got to have a toilet paper fight when they finished!
We always see bats around at Halloween. But we really didn't know a huge amount about them. So we began to look at their features and characteristics. We displayed our bat facts on our bat books. 
Following on from our 'Witches brew' music lesson. We made our very own witches brews. We used unicorn dust, dead worms, crushed bones and lots more truly disgusting ingredients. When we mixed them together our brews boiled and bubbled..... making a HUGE MESS!!!!!

SEPTEMBER!

With this new school year comes a new classroom, four new students, and lots of new things to learn! September has been busy as we settled into our new surroundings. Our themes for September were 'Myself' and 'School'
Since the Waterford Hurlers did so well in the All Ireland, we used 'Colin' and 'Tadhg' (named by the children!) to help us learn the body parts.
For Circle Time, we used key questions to find out more about each other. We continued on from this and created 'Timelines' of our lives.
To continue learning about our Body Parts, we explored different movement during P.E such as rolling, balancing and travelling.
We are well on our way to becoming accomplished cooks this year as we have already created some tasty sandwiches, egg muffins, peanut butter bars and healthy oat balls!
We are getting into the swing of our subject stations for this year. Here we are busy with some Maths activities. 
We love a Science Experiment in Primary 3! So to kick off the experiments for this year, we discovered what happens when water and skittles mix! The result was very colourful! We enjoyed predicting and observing!
Music has been a little different so far this year! We made our own Pan pipes from straws and had a chance to play on Mrs Hogan's Bodhran. One of our students is learning this wonderful instrument, so it was nice for everyone to get first hand experience of playing it too! We also love learning new songs like 'The Ratlin Bog' and 'Reach', accompanied by the class guitar.
We learned about shadows and how they can change depending on the light. We made silhouettes of each other by shining torches at our heads and tracing around the shadows. We then painted them black. The results looked super!
We love 'The Wonky Donkey' book in our class and especially the song that goes with it!! We made Wonky Donkey puppets, while singing and dancing along, we discovered they make interesting shadows on the whiteboard!
We explored the idea of 'Pop Art' and how it is created using bright blocks of colours. We made our own 'Pop Art' Portrait Paintings and were so happy with the realistic results.
We were so lucky to meet Nicky Byrne when he and Ruth were broadcasting for 2fm in the square!!!