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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!

Welcome to Junior Infants! We were very excited to start our primary school journeys in Kilcornan National School! We have been making lots of friends and getting to know the school and our new classroom. We have been working hard and remembering to use our ‘Kind Words, Kind Hands and Kind Feet’ everywhere that we go. Ms. Balfry is very proud of us and we get stickers for our charts when we are kind to one another.

We love playing in Junior Infants and have had lots of fun building with lego, magnets, sticky bricks, straws and using the kitchen sets and mini vehicles. We also love movement breaks and dancing and moving our bodies with Go Noodle. We have maxed out two characters already!

Even though we are only in school a short time, we have been working very hard. We have learned lots of new sounds already and are practising our blending. We recite rhymes together and love doing Mental Maths and engaging in Maths Talk! We enjoyed using the Athletics equipment for P.E and are getting very good at skipping and hopping and jumping.

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Chloe comes to visit us every week from Music Generation and we have learned lots about musical instruments and singing. Art is definitely one of our favourite subjects and we have learned about the primary colours, secondary colours, colour mixing and warm and cool colours as well as making lovely autumn trees, engaging with fingerpainting and creating spooky Halloween Art like vampire bats! We loved dressing up for Halloween and Ms. Balfry didn’t even recognise some of us. We also took part in our first Jersey Day and had fun bringing our homework into school on ‘Anything but a Schoolbag Day!’

Thanks so much to Ms. Clancy who also teaches us and to Catherine who helps us in class every day. We deserve a good rest after our first term in school and we are looking forward to the Mid Term Break. Check back in with us again soon for more updates. Slán from Junior Infants!

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Nollaig Shona Daoibh from everyone in Junior Infants! We are so excited for Christmas. We are hoping Santa will visit us all on the 24^th of December. Santa sent his elf Charlie to stay with us in school and he has been watching us all very carefully! We think he will report back lots of good things to Santa about us.

We have had the best two months in Junior Infants! We performed in our very first Christmas show in the community hall in December. We practiced very hard for weeks and learned lots of new songs to perform on stage. The girls were angels and the boys were shepherds in the show. Lots of our families came to visit and they were very proud of us. Ms. Balfry was so proud of us too! The name of our show was ‘The Bossy King’. We learned all about the story of Jesus being born when we were getting ready for our show and we love looking at the crib in our classroom.

We have lots of decorations in our room as we prepare for Christmas. We all helped decorate the Christmas tree and everyone brought in an ornament from home to put on it. We painted Christmas robins in art and listen to Christmas stories every day. We learned all about Daidí na Nollag in our Irish lessons and how to say ‘Nollag Shona Duit’ to our friends.

We had our first school trip this month when we went to the panto ‘Aladdin’ in the Lime Tree theatre. It was some of the class’ first time on a bus. We laughed, sang and shouted at the mean character in the panto. It was the best day!

In November, we celebrated Anti Bullying Week and Science Week. We listened to the story of Sid the Sock and made our own odd socks to show how special everyone is. We loved Science Week as we carried out lots of STEM experiments like making our own bridges,causing explosions with baking soda and vinegar and looking at dyes in food with skittles.

We learned all our sight words and read our first reader called ‘The Picnic’ in school. We really loved reading it. We have been working hard learning all our sounds in school too and make ‘predictions’ when we read stories. We took part in four online wellbeing workshops too where we listened to stories, recited rhymes, stretched and danced. We are looking forward to continuing them in the new year.

We started Food Dudes also in November. We loved getting to try new fruit and veg everyday in school and got lots of amazing certificates, stickers and prizes when we tried them. We watched videos where the Food Dudes defeated General Junk by feeding the force with fruit and veg!

We are looking forward to our holidays after all our hard work. Thank you so much to Catherine who helps us in our classroom every day. Happy Christmas from everyone in Junior Infants!! We will be back again soon!

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