Category Archives: Second Class

A Tangram is an Ancient Chinese puzzle made up of specific shapes that when put together correctly can make a square. You can also use the shapes to make many different patterns such as animals or people. In Second Class we used them to solve some Tangram puzzles and then used our shapes to create some animals for a display. Lunar New Year falls this week and it is the most celebrated festival in the world. Each year celebrates a specific animal and this year’s animal is the Tiger.

Gong Hei Fat Choy! (Happy New Year)

Second Class have settled in to their new school year very comfortably. We have all got to know the new routines quickly and we have enjoyed getting down to work. Here is an example of some art work we completed using oil pastels. First we explored leaves, collected some and then discussed how they change during autumn when they are losing their chlorophyll. Then we chose autumn coloured pastels to create our own.

We’ve planted, germinated, watered and taken care of lots of growing things in Second Class this term. It’s been great to watch the seeds sprout and see how the different plants grow. We’ve grown lettuce, spring onion, spinach, carrots, broad beans, tomatoes, garlic and two different types of sunflowers. Everyone got to take home a plant this week to care for over the next few weeks or months. Nature has been a great focus over the past few months and complemented our studying of Earth and Biodiversity perfectly.

Last week Aongus’ Second Class were lucky to get a free walking trip to Airfield. We walked up in the fresh air enjoying the sights of Dundrum village as we went. It was a 20 minute walk. We saw a lot of biodiversity including some very large trees in the gardens of the house and we think one of them is a Sequoia or Giant Redwood, they are from the largest family of trees in the world. We noticed that the gardeners had planted a lot of new and different vegetables in the garden. There were also a lot of broad beans similar to those we have planted at school and in our classroom, and we saw artichokes as well! We also looked at the walled garden and the beehives nearby. There was a lot of different insect life there as well as extra birds probably because of the many wild plants that have been let grow to encourage pollination, just like we are doing at school on our green area. After visiting the farm animals which included the Jersey Cows, we stopped by the playground and zipline. We’re very grateful to Fiona and the staff at Airfield for facilitating our free visit.

This week the children learned a lot about the different parts of a food chain and why they are so important to all of us animals. They learned vocabulary such as Producer, Consumer, Predator, Herbivore, Carnivore and Omnivore. For their homework the children made a poster containing a food chain which they had researched. They really did brilliantly with this task. A few of the Food Chain posters are posted below.

In Second Class we have started learning about Biodiversity. We’ve been thinking about our ‘Beautiful Earth‘ and our ‘Colourful Earth‘. Today we tried to find as much diversity in our plant life as possible by focusing on different colours. We were very successful and put our colour samples together on a ‘Colourful Earth’ display card. Sinéad pointed out to us that we have a once rare flower growing in our small but diverse green space, the cowslip. We tried not to take too many samples so as to leave food for the insects and bees as well as leaving opportunities for the bees to collect pollen.

Today in Aongus’ 2nd Class we came up with a list of nine characteristics or attributes a good friend might have. Then we tried to decide which of these would be most important in a good friend. We used a ‘Diamond Sorting’ technique which is an active learning method. The children decided which characteristics might go at the top of their diamond and why, and also decided what should go at the bottom and why. There was some good debate about what a word like ‘cool’ or ‘beautiful’ might mean to different people. The children first worked in pairs, then with their pod and then we sorted them out as a whole class. We realised that a good friend may not always be happy and that maybe you need to be a very good friend to them in that moment. Caring, Kind and Helpful were characteristics that were thought of as very important.

Second Class took a trip out to the park at the back of our school recently to identify some features of Autumn in our neighbourhood. The two trickiest things on the scavenger hunt were the Squirrel and some Fungi, but we got them! We also collected some twigs and leaves to create our hedgehog collages.