Welcome back to Senior Infants and First Class! It has been wonderful to be back and meet our friends again!
We are delighted to be able to use Aistear this year as a learning tool. Aistear allows the children to explore a topic across a variety of curricular areas that all link together. It provides hands-on learning activities and creates meaningful shared experiences for the children.
Our first topic was ‘Myself’. We worked together in groups at a different station each day; we created self-portraits in plasticine, examining our features in mirrors; we identified body parts in the SESE group; we role-played being a family, each person taking on different roles, and used our play kitchen and soft seating to create our home; we traced our hands and feet and used non-standard units of measurement to measure and compare the length and width of each; and we wrote all about ourselves on a flower, saying our likes and dislikes, who is in our family and our favourite hobbies.
Our second Aistear topic was ‘The Airport’. We were lucky enough to be able to use the library for our role-play, where we took on different roles – being the pilot, the passenger, the air steward etc; we made passports for ourselves in the literacy station; in the numeracy station we used weighing scales and balances to explore weight – a very important packing skill when travelling via air!; we had free creative reign at the junk art station and we made models of planes and the airport at the construction station. This topic was really useful for Senior Infants because their first reader was called ‘Ella goes to the Airport’, and they were very familiar with the new vocabulary when reading.
Our next Aistear topic was ‘Autumn’. We read a beautiful story called ‘Don’t Hog the Hedge’ about Hattie the Hedgehog and her unlikely friends – we used this as the basis for our role-play station and everyone took turns being Hattie; we had a reading station in Ms. Balfry’s room with books based on our theme, and we used the bean bags and cushions to get really comfy!; at the numeracy station we had Halloween themed number lines; we especially loved making our collaborative potions, which Mrs. Gleeson typed on the interactive whiteboard as we decided on our disgusting ingredients, then we hit print and each got to design our own printed copy of the potion; at the art station we created 3D hedgehogs using dried autumn leaves and matchsticks to create the spines.
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