This week we all came together for our first assembly to celebrate the beginning of a new school year. Each class performed a song or a poem they had learned in Irish. Some of the fifth and sixth class read out letters that they had also written in Irish to their penpals. We look forward to more assemblies throughout the year.

Today we used our new tablets & headphones for the first time. Junior Infants listened to their new Jolly Phonics sounds and songs while Senior Infants did some reading. We are really looking forward to using our tablets across all curriculum areas this year.

On Thankful Tuesday we read the story "Have you Filled a Bucket Today?" and then filled each others buckets. We coloured in a worksheet showing all the "I can.." things we can do. We all Walked A Mile with a Smile together this morning! We also took part in geography team games!

We are developing friendships and interactions between our pupils in Garrafrauns N.S. We have been working on our concentration, forward planning, reasoning and problem solving. We have seen a huge improvement in chess this year and look forward to competing in the Lá Ficheall tournament next year!

The fifth & sixth class students joined junior & senior infants today to work on the learning outcome of retelling and elaboration. The older chidren retold a story they had read & the younger children asked them questions. We then swapped & the younger children told the seniors a piece of news & the seniors helped them to elaborate on it.

We have been working on report writing in English. We have written reports on spring flowers, the lion and other things. As part of this genre the children each brought in something special from home and gave an oral report to the class about their object. 

We have been learning about the lifecycle of the butterfly in science. We read and discussed the story of The Very Hungry Caterpillar for English and then we sequenced the story for history. We then created our own caterpillars and colourful butterflies for art.

We have been learning a lot from the fifth and sixth class pupils. They have kindly visited our classroom and taught us some chess and some table tennis. 

We edited our writing and used our rubrics to ensure we had a capital letter at the start of each sentence and a full stop at the end. We look forward to comparing our writing from the beginning of the year with our end of year writing samples!