Junior Infants have been very busy and having lots of fun in the lead-up to Easter! We have been enjoying lots of playtime across our different role-play and exploration areas including our weather station, farm shop, garden centre and our very exciting airport. The children have shown fantastic imagination, teamwork and communication skills while learning through play. ✈️

As part of our hands-on learning, there was great excitement when we made our own butter and we also got our hands dirty while planting peas. The children loved learning about how things grow and how food is made. 🌱

During Wellbeing Week, we took part in a range of lovely activities including mindfulness sessions, calming games and movement breaks. These helped us practise being kind to ourselves and others while developing important wellbeing skills. 💛

For Seachtain na Gaeilge, we were delighted to dance to ‘Shoe the Donkey’ with boys and girls from the junior classes. We enjoyed using our cúpla focal throughout the week in songs, games and everyday classroom activities.

In literacy, the children have worked incredibly hard and we are delighted to say that we have now finished learning all of our sounds. We have recently started our readers, which the children are bringing home for homework. The readers are also being used during literacy stations in school, helping to build confidence, fluency and a love of reading.📚⭐

We are also currently doing gymnastics, where the children are developing their balance, coordination and confidence through fun movement challenges and activities. 🤸‍♀️

We would like to thank our wonderful SNA Catherine for all of the help and support she gives us in our classroom everyday.

Well done to all the Junior Infants for their fantastic effort, enthusiasm and positive attitude this term. We are very proud of all their learning and growth. We wish everyone a happy and restful Easter break! 🐰🌷

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Hello everyone! We are the Junior Infants and we want to tell you all about the exciting things we have been doing in our classroom. We have been working so hard and having so much fun, especially because Christmas is coming!

Over the past few weeks, we have been getting ready for our very first Christmas show. Every morning and afternoon, we practised our songs, our lines, and where we have to stand on the stage. We loved singing and practising our lines together. We are going to be angels and shepherds, and we can’t wait for our families to see us all dressed up. We have been feeling very proud of ourselves. Twinkle, our classroom elf, has also come to visit to see all the amazing things the boys and girls are doing. He has been very busy getting up to lots of mischief around the classroom, and we have loved discovering what he has been up to each day.

Our playtime has been extra special too. Our room turned into Santa’s Workshop, and we got to be busy little elves. We made toys, fixed toys, wrapped presents, and even checked Santa’s lists! We used our imaginations and worked together to make sure everything would be ready for Christmas. It was so much fun helping Santa prepare for Christmas! 

In writing, we learned all about persuasive features. We used our new skills to write letters to Santa. We told him why we have been good and what presents we would love this year. We also made beautiful Christmas decorations using lots of colours, glitter and different materials. Now our classroom looks very bright and Christmassy.

In Maths, we have been learning about numbers, partitioning and combining sets, and we also explored balance and data. We used lots of hands-on materials like cubes, counters, and scales to help us understand. We enjoyed sorting things, counting together, and trying out different ways to make numbers.

We are getting much better at our sounds too. We practise them every day and we are getting really good at blending. We have even started reading little passages all on our own! We feel like real readers and it makes us very excited to learn more.

In Irish, we have been learning lots of new words and phrases. We love practising them with each other and with anyone who comes into our room. When we see visitors, we smile and say, “Dia duit” and “Conas atá tú?” We are very proud of how much Irish we know already.

We also want to give a big thank you to our SNA, Catherine. She helps us every day with our work, our play, and everything we need. We are very lucky to have her in our class.

We hope everyone has a wonderful holiday.

Happy Christmas from all of us in Junior Infants! 🎄✨

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Hello and goodbye from Junior Infants! We can’t believe we have reached the end of our first year in primary school! How the time has flown. Since Easter we have been very busy in class. We have finished all our class readers now. We have been working hard on our handwriting and tackled tricky topics like money in Maths. We are continuing to read books everyday as they are so important for us as well as writing sentences and stories. We are also continuing with our rhymes and phonological awareness every day.

We became skipping experts during our ‘Skip to Europe’ Challenge for Active Schools and lots of us even bought our own skipping ropes afterwards! We travelled to three different countries during it. We have also enjoyed doing the PAWS Water Safety programme as part of our P.E lessons and have learned very important rules when you are around water.

We experienced Food Dudes for the first time and really enjoyed sampling all the fruit and vegetables each day. Some of us even tried vegetables we had never eaten before! We loved the lunchbox we got as a surprise too.

We went to Arena 5 for our first school tour and had such fun using the Soft Play and Jump Lanes. We visited Mungret playground on the way home, so we were all very tired when we got back! We also took part in our first Marathon Relay with the school which was amazing! We all ran as fast as we could around the circle and cheered on the teachers when they did their 3-legged race! We got ice cream as a treat afterwards from the Parents’ Council.

We have enjoyed watching the builders build our new school extension every-day when we are in the yard and we can’t wait until it is finished. Ms. Balfry says we will be in Senior Infants when it will be ready. Speaking of Senior Infants, we think we are ready to head therein September! Thanks so much to Catherine for helping us everyday in school and to Ms. Clancy for teaching us all year. We are very lucky to have you both! Have a lovely summer and catch us all again in Senior Infants. Slán go fóil!

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Hello again from Junior Infants! What a busy term we have had. We took part in our first Grandparents’ Day in January and were so excited to welcome our grandparents into the school. We recited a grandparents day rhyme and sang a little song for them and afterwards, they came over to visit our classroom. We also started gymnastics lessons as part of our P.E and loved taking part in these each week. We learned how to balance and hold poses, walk forwards and backwards on beams and do the front crawl.

We had a Pyjama Day and had such fun coming into school with our pyjamas, slippers, dressing gowns and onesies on. We hope we can do another one soon! As we are in Junior Infants, we had a lot of ‘firsts’ this term. We took part in our first Wellness Week in school. We went for walks, read our favourite books, danced, and we even brought in our pillows and blankets to relax and meditate. It was really enjoyable.

We also visited the Scholastic Book Fair and bought lots of books to read at home. We dressed up for World Book Day and paraded around the school yard so all the parents could see our amazing costumes. We had lots of fun talking about our favourite characters and our favourite books.

Ms. Ruddle helped us to make bird feeders for biodiversity week using cereal. We took them home to hang on our trees and the birds really enjoyed eating them!

We have been working so hard in school and are now learning sight words for our last reader. We are reading Decodable stories each night for homework and are practicing our blending everyday. Our Literacy stations are continuing each week where we read, write and blend also. We are still learning rhymes as they are so important and have started our second rhyme book for homework. We are also doing lots of free writing and letter formation.

We had a lego hunt during our last week in school. We had to find a lego block with our name on it in the astro turf pitch. They were hidden under lots and lots of cones! When we found the block, we exchanged it for a treat! We also couldn’t believe it when the Easter Bunny popped by our room on our last day and gave us all an Easter Egg! We have worked very hard this term and are looking forward to a nice break! Thank you so much to Catherine who helps us each day and to Ms. Clancy for teaching us. Happy Easter from Junior Infants!