Last month, First Class were learning all about weight so what better way to test out our knowledge and skills than baking cupcakes?!

In groups, we weighed out the butter and sugar, before mixing it together in the mixing bowl. Next we carefully cracked the eggs into the bowl, making sure no shell went in to the mixture (imagine crunching on eggshell in your cupcake! Ew!). When we had mixed the eggs with the butter and sugar, we weighed the self-raising flour were and gently mixed it in to the batter.
This helped our buns to rise and be lovely and fluffy when they were cooked.

We then placed the mixture into bun cases on a baking tray, before putting them into the oven for 20 minutes. When they turned golden-brown, we took them out and got to make yummy icing to decorate our buns. The best bit was definitely getting to taste our iced buns. They were absolutely delicious!

This week First Class were describing how houses and homes can be different, before drawing and labeling pictures of our own homes.

In our table groups, we then had to work together to build houses out of Lego. We were given a brief of what our houses must include (a door, windows, 2 storeys and a roof). At first, this seemed like a very challenging task but the amazing architects, brilliant builders, perfect problem-solvers and enthusiastic engineers of First Class powered through and every single group successfully completed the brief.

1st class have been very active in Maths class this week! We have been learning about length, width and height. We have been making predictions and then measuring various items around the classroom. We used non-standard units of measurement such as cubes, links, hand spans and strides. Today we tried measuring with a standard unit of measurement, the metre! We used a piece of string, which was exactly one metre long, to measure the doors, windows, desks and even the width of the entire classroom!

Last week, we were exploring and experimenting with pattern in maths, art, music and almost every other subject you can think of! We realised we are surrounded by different patterns so our pattern-making skills were Level: Expert! We made patterns in a variety of ways, including Lego, buttons, shapes, colours and cubes. We even created a grid of 28 different patterns on paper using oil pastels. We then painted each pattern grid with watercolours but the clever oil pastel was able to resist the paint, resulting in these fabulous masterpieces.

We have been learning about 2D Shapes recently and decided to see how many shapes we could find in our own classroom. Did you know we are surrounded by all kinds of shapes everywhere we go?

Our bin has a circle at the top.

The 100 Square is a giant square itself.

Our Worry Monster has an oval-shaped tummy.

Our paint pots  and glue sticks have circle faces too.

For World Book Day, we dressed up as our favourite characters and creatures.

Most of Hogwarts came to our school on this day, as well as other witches and wizards, football players, doctors, ghosts and even Horrid Henry! It was an eventful day trying to do maths and read stories with dinosaurs, princesses, zombies, pirates, Alice in Wonderland, ghostbusters and Lego ninjas sitting in our classroom!

You have heard of Google Maps but now get ready for First Class Maps!

We became cartographers last week when we made maps of our classroom. We had to imagine we were spiders crawling along the ceiling and looking down at the desks. Standing on our chairs and looking directly down at our tables helped us imagine how the other objects in the classroom would look from a Bird’s eye view.

Last Tuesday, 1st class had a visit from Ian Patterson, who told us lots of interesting facts about birds of prey. He brought in two of his birds, Fluffy, the long eared owl and Bob the falcon. Although Fluffy had the most amazing big bright orange eyes, we learned that  owls cannot see very well in the daylight. We also learned that they fly almost completely silently due the type of feathers they have. This makes them excellent hunters. Some of the children got the chance to put on the leather glove and wait for one of these amazing birds to fly and land on their outstretched arm! It was a wonderful experience for all!

We are enjoying learning together in First Class.  Every day we work in small groups to improve our literacy skills.  We rotate through four different literacy activities.  Nick helps us with our writing skills and Ann and Sinéad work with us to develop reading and comprehension skills.  We have learned plenty of new information and skills from reading very interesting books and from writing in different genres.

In maths we love to use materials and play games to help us learn.  We work as a team and help each other to complete mathematical challenges!

In our Irish lessons we have become fantastic at having conversations and singing songs ‘as Gaeilge’.  Some children have even started to write little books as Gaeilge.  Bainaigí úsáid as bhur gcúpla focail sa bhaile leis an gcomhrá thíos!

Dia duit…….Dia is Muire duit.

Conas atá tú?………Tá mé go maith.

Cén rang ina bhfuil tú?…….. Tá mé i Rang a hAon

Cén aois thú?………Tá mé sé bliana/seacht mbliana d’aois.

As Deireadh Fomhair draws to a close so does Autumn and in First class we have spent a great deal of time looking at the changes in the seasons. In first class this month we examined the warm autumnal colours and used them in our Art. We looked to the school grounds for inspiration and as the leaves fell, this became the perfect inspiration behind our art work. We learned all about animals hibernating, and we discovered how to do our bit to get ready for this special time of year. We examined the hedgehogs closely and told Jim the caretaker to look out for any hedgehogs that might be hiding out in the piles of leaves on the school grounds.

 

It was a beautiful bright autumn day this morning and First class enjoyed an autumn walk in the grounds of the school.

We have lots of keen observers in our class and we were able to identify many of the plants, insects and trees in the grounds including the horse chestnut tree, rose hips, blackberries, ivy and willow.  We also noticed the changing colours of the autumn leaves and we look forward to seeing how the leaves and trees change over the coming weeks.

When we returned to the classroom we made leaf and bark rubbings and drew fantastic pictures, with great detail showing what we had seen on our walk.

First Class walked to Airfield Farm last week. We had a fabulous time. We saw lots of animals, including horses and a foal, sheep, goats and chickens. We saw a cow being milked and came across a great collection of vintage cars. We had a wonderful walk there and back, noticing many beautiful signs of spring along the way. We noticed lovely daffodils growing in a nearby garden and other spring flowers starting to bloom. Before we returned to school, we had a very enjoyable time in the playground at Airfield. We even got to have a go on the zip line!

We love being active in First Class! We have been doing a lot of athletics this term, as part of our P.E. lessons. We have been learning the right technique for running, sprinting and for hurdling. We have been learning how to work together in teams, participating in various types of relay races and we have been working on our reaction sprints. Athletics is so much fun! We have especially enjoyed our athletics stations, where we have been working on our coordination skills whilst learning how to hula hoop and we have been putting all our newly learned athletics techniques to good use as we run, skip and jump through the other stations. Take a look at how active are!

This month First Class have been exploring space and the solar system. We have learned so many interesting facts about space and have used our imaginations to become astronauts and to have our own space adventures along the way! We wrote fantastic pieces about the Solar System and about space travel. We created beautiful wax resist paintings of the Solar System and gorgeous chalk pastel drawings of the Northern Lights. 

Winter is well and truly here and this month in First Class we have been embracing the cold and using it to fuel our creativity! We created fantastic oil pastel drawings of children wrapped up in winter clothes, catching snowflakes on their tongues. We got the inspiration for this artwork from the poem ‘Winter Morning Poem’ by Ogden Nash:

Winter is the king of showmen

Turning tree stumps into snow men

And houses into birthday cakes

And spreading sugar over lakes

Smooth and clean and frosty white

The world looks good enough to bite

That’s the season to be young

Catching snowflakes on your tongue

Snow is snowy when it’s snowing

I’m sorry it’s slushy when it’s going

We also wrote some wonderfully imaginative stories about a snowman, inspired by the story ‘The Snowman’ by Raymond Briggs.

Take a look at our creative writing below!

We have been learning all about the Arctic and the Antarctic this month in First Class. The weather has turned cold here in Ireland but we discovered that it is considerably colder all year round in these Polar regions! We took a look at some of the animals who live in both the Arctic and in Antarctica. We wrote wonderful reports about these animals and also produced fantastic artwork to represent these animals. Both First Classes created gorgeous polar animal sculptures out of clay and we also made 3D penguins using oil pastels. Take a look at our wonderfully cute animals below!

During the month of December, as part of our ethical education, we learned all about some important winter festivals which are celebrated both here in Ireland and in other parts of the world. We focused in particular on the festivals of Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and Christmas. We completed many activities based around these festivals.

As a follow up to everything we learned about the Jewish festival of Hanukkah, we wrote beautiful Hanukkah acrostic poetry and painted colourful candles in art.

Kwanzaa is a secular festival, which honours African heritage in African -American culture. We made impressive collage pictures of the Kinara, which is the special candle holder used to represent the seven core principles of Kwanzaa. These principles are Umoja (Unity), Kujichagulia (Self-Determination), Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility), Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics), Kuumba (Creativity) and Imani (Faith).

As part of our discussion of the festival of Christmas, we focused on some creative writing. We based this around a wonderful story we read by the author Dr. Seuss. The story was entitled ‘How the Grinch Stole Christmas.’ We discussed the Grinch, the main character in the story and came up with many ideas about why he was so grumpy and why he didn’t like the festival of Christmas. We brainstormed ways in which we could cheer him up and then wrote about this. Take a look at the wonderful work we produced. We are very proud of our grumpy Grinch pictures!

For the month of December we focused on math word problems during our math stations. We are becoming so good at breaking word problems up into smaller chunks and using pictures and discussion to solve them! We have loved working together for this problem solving and we are finding out that we are becoming really excellent at listening and cooperating in our stations.

We were inspired by the wonderful pumpkins grown in our very own school vegetable patch and decided to have a go at creating our own pumpkin pictures. Look at the fantastic still life drawings we have produced. We used oil pastels to really make the autumn colours stand out. We are so proud of our positively perfect pumpkins!!

We have been having a lot of fun with maths so far this term! We have been solving problems and working together to figure out the properties of big numbers! We have had great fun working in maths stations, completing loads of fun activities and creating exciting games with number. Our skills are really improving and we are becoming confident mathematicians!

Take a look at how busy we have been! 

In June, Ciara’s First Class have been learning all about Australia. The children have really enjoyed this topic and worked really hard on their ‘Australia Projects’.  Look at how proud they are!

We always do our best to integrate our monthly themes through all the different curricular subjects. In Geography, we studied Australia’s location, population and landmarks. In Science, we learned all about the interesting and dangerous wildlife found in Australia, and we studied the beautiful Great Barrier Reef.  In History, we learned the about Aborigines. We studied their ancient carvings and created our own stories using ancient aboriginal symbols. 

We paid a visit to John’s class to present our projects and share our learning.  We also performed the Australian song ‘Kookaburah sits in the old Gum Tree’  for John’s class. In Art, we created beautiful Aboriginal Dot paintings. Look at the amazing patterns we made! We also got our hands dirty and made some clay lizards, snakes and turtles.