Junior Infants

11/11/2021

Ms Darcy is so happy to welcome such a lovely Junior Infant class to Newtownmountkennedy Primary School. We have been very busy getting to know each other and doing lots of learning. We are kind friends and good listeners.

September

Self portraits

We really enjoyed drawing ourselves. Aren’t our portraits picture perfect?!

Nursery Rhymes

We learn a nursery rhyme each week. We helped to put humpty dumpty back together again!

Phonics

We are using the Heggerty Phonological Programme which will help us to read. We also listen to the Jolly Phonics songs and stories at the end of the day.

Feelings

We are following the Stay Safe programme in SPHE. We have covered the topics of feelings, friendship and bullying. It is important that we tell somebody if we have a problem.

Fine Motor Skills

We have been working on our fine motor skills so that we can hold our pencil correctly. We hold it like a crocodile’s mouth.

Goldilocks and the Three Bears

We learnt about the home and read the story of Goldilocks and the three bears. Goldilocks broke the chair. We made porridge for Goldilocks, she loved baby bears. Some of us made the perfect house for Goldilocks.

My Family

We drew pictures of our family. All families are different. We love our families.

The Three Little Pigs

This was our next theme in Aistear. The big bad wolf blew down the houses of straw and sticks.

October

Nature Walk

We collected leaves and conkers. Conkers come from the horse chestnut tree. We even found an acorn from an oak tree.

Autumn

We loved learning the song Autumn leaves and even did some cutting out leaves.

Autumn Trees

We used cotton buds and paint to make our Autumn trees.

Hibernation

We read the books, "Don’t Hog the Hedge" and "Whoever Has Heard of the Hibernating Pig" where we learnt all about the animals which hibernate.

Farm Shop

We harvested vegetables and sold them in the farm shop.

Forest Walk

We did some art on our autumn forest walk. We took inspiration from the book called ‘Leaf Man’. A sinking and floating experiment also took place.

Shapes

We have loved using our whiteboards. We are so proud that we can draw different shapes.

Number formation

We have been practising making the number 2 in different ways.

Halloween

We absolutely loved learning all of the Irish words associated with Halloween such as púca. We made different witches’ potions and tasted bairín breac where we found a ring.

November

The Restaurant

At the beginning of the month we had fun in the restaurant taking each other’s orders. We took it in turns being the waiters and the customers. We loved washing up the dishes.

Science Week

We decided to do some experiments. We made butter by shaking cream, we then spread the butter on bread. It was delicious!
We also did the mentos and coke experiment. When we put the mentos into the coke, it caused a reaction. It was like a volcano erupting.

The Bakery

We absolutely loved being bakers. Not only did we make lots of delicious treats with our playdoh, we also made clay doughnuts. We had fun making cakes for our siblings when we were in the sand area.

The Gingerbread Man

We sequenced the story of the Gingerbread Man. We made predictions about whether the fox would eat the Gingerbread Man, unfortunately he did. When the eagle saves the Gingerbread Man is a much better ending.

Vegetable Printing

We loved printing with various vegetables such as broccoli and potatoes. We also used letter stamps to write our names.

December

Christmas Banner

Each class chose a theme for the Christmas banner. We painted baubles with lots of glitter. They were all so unique and Christmassy.

The Post Office

We thoroughly enjoyed sending and receiving post. It was so much fun. We used stamps and wrote letters. We also practised our wrapping skills so that we could help our families wrap Christmas presents.

Numbers

We love maths especially practising our numbers.

Nollaig

Nollaig, Santa’s elf, arrived in our class on December 1st to the excitement of all the children. He had many adventures and unfortunately fell off the elf house, thankfully he recovered!!

Santa's Workshop

Our second theme in December for Aistear was Santa's workshop. We had loads of fun pretending to be Santa, his elves and reindeers. We also enjoyed colouring in and assembling the elf house in our classroom. We were excellent toy testers too.

Trip to the Post Office

We wrote cards to our family and then walked to the post office to post them. Our families were delighted with our Christmas cards.

Hot Chocolate

We were absolutely delighted with the delicious treat of hot chocolate from the Parents Association.

Nursery Rhyme Nativity

We loved performing our Christmas Nativity. Ms Darcy recorded it so that our family could watch it on Google Classroom. We enjoyed saying our lines, singing the songs and doing the actions to the songs. We were excellent actors and actresses.

Santa's Visit

We were so excited when Santa came to visit our classroom. He was so impressed with all of us. Ms Darcy told him how well behaved and hardworking we have been since September.

January

Happy Birthday!!

As we had so many birthdays in January we decided to celebrate during Aistear. We made cakes, had numerous puppet shows and served delicious and healthy food.

Handwriting

We started our cursive handwriting this month. We have so much fun practising forming the letters in different ways.

Magnets

Junior Infants love doing experiments in Science. We learnt that metal is attracted to magnets. We made fish and attached a paper clip to its mouth. We made fishing rods with a magnet and string and had such fun fishing.

The Arctic and Antarctica

We loved being Arctic explorers. We made cute Arctic foxes. We also made penguins but as they live in Antarctica, Ms Darcy had to hang them up in a different area in the room. We had such fun playing with the animals during small world play and watching the ice melt.

Banksy Inspired Art

We had great enjoyment spray painting the Polar Lights (Aurora Borealis and Aurora Australis). Banksy is a graffiti artist so it was great that we could spray paint outside like he does.

February

Space

We rocketed into space in February in our very own rocket!! We explored space in our spaceship and loved our space movement break which helped us remember the planets and some fun facts about each one.

The Best Dress Ever

We read a book about an alien called Zid whose friends helped him to design the best dress ever. We love helping our friends in school. Check out the dresses we made.

Cursive handwriting

We are so excited that we can now write words in cursive handwriting.

March

Lent

The first of March was Shrove Tuesday/ Pancake Tuesday. We ate delicious pancakes with chocolate spread. For lent we are going to show kindness to our family and friends in many different ways such as helping others and sharing.

The Lifecycle of the Butterfly

We really enjoyed learning about the lifecycle of the butterfly. How the butterfly lays eggs, the eggs turn into a chrysalis, the chrysalis transforms into a caterpillar and finally the caterpillar turns into a butterfly. We also loved reading and sequencing 'The Hungry Caterpillar'story. We made butterflies during our art lesson and also used playdoh to show the lifecycle of the butterfly.

The Flower Shop

We had such fun buying and selling flowers in the flower shop. We even did some flower arranging in the sand area. Ms Darcy was very impressed that we also had set up a website for our flower shop so that others could buy our flowers online. We also tried the colouring changing flower experiment by adding food colouring to water to change the colour of the petals.

Saint Patrick

We learnt about our Saint Patrick during our religion lessons. During Aistear we held a wonderful Saint Patrick's Day parade, made leprechaun traps, searched for gold in the sand and made festive rice shakers.

The Vet

We had a terrific time learning about the role of the vet during Aistear. We loved using the animal puppets during role play. The vet greeted us with a smile, listened to our pet's heartbeat using a stethoscope and gave them injections if needed.

April

The Farm

We had such fun on the farm, from driving in the tractor to collecting the hens eggs. There were so many sorting opportunities for us as well. We also saw some photos of newborn animals who were born on Ms Darcy's uncle's farm. Ms Darcy's favourite song was 'Tá feirm ag an bhfeirmeoir. We were able to learn the Irish words for animals from this song. Cow = bó, calf = lao, sheep = caora, lamb = uan, pig = muc, piglet = banabh.

Easter

Throughout Lent we worked on being kind and helping others. We learnt all about Easter in our religion lessons.

Maths

We absolutely love maths! This month we tried to practise our number formation, counting and adding as much as possible.

May

Transport

We learnt all about different modes of transport this month. We also had bike day and coloured in our helmets which are so important for us to wear.

Teddy Bear Picnic

As our class reward we had a picnic with our teddy bears. We had so much fun and especially liked playing with our bears afterwards.

School Tour

We had such an amazing time at Kia Ora farm. We loved travelling on the bus with our classmates. All of the animals were so cute and we were so lucky to have the opportunity to feed them. We had so much fun in the maze too.