Newcastle National School - Junior Infants

Junior Infants

Nativity Art

We are learning about the First Christmas in religion lessons. We love playing with the crib in the classroom and are looking forward to visiting the church next week. This week we created lovely pictures showing the nativity scene.

It's Christmas!

There's great excitement to see the Christmas lights in Athenry this evening so we decided to kick start the festivities by decorating our tree today. We were delighted to have some friends from 6th class join us. Afterwards everyone enjoyed a hot chocolate together. Christmas has now officially started in Junior Infants!

Winter Art

Recently we followed a guided drawing lesson to make a snowman. We also created beautiful winter scenes using blue paper, white paint and some glitter. We also love making paper chains during free play sessions.

Handa's Surprise

Our story of the week was Handa's Surprise. Throughout the week we read the story, explored the big book version, worked with a friend to create a story map and cut out animals to create a picture with all the characters. As the book is set in Kenya we learned some interesting facts about the country. We finished the week by trying some fruits from the story and also trying some fruits from other countries.

In maths we are working on 3D shapes. We identified the different properties of a sphere, cube, cuboid, cone and cylinder. We explored whether the shapes roll or stack and we went on a 3D shape hunt around the classroom.

In PE we've been enjoying playing 6-7 tag. We are also working on gymnastics.

Music Generation

Everyone loves Music Generation. James teaches us lots of songs and he has also introduced the ukulele in music lessons.

Tríona's Lovely Art

Super talented Tríona (who also created all the gorgeous murals around the school) designed a fabulous poster for our classroom door.

Reading in Junior Infants

Ms. Fahy and Tríona are very proud of all the children in Junior Infants. They are working really hard to learn all their new sounds and blend them together to read words. Today we played a Read and Roll game together to work on blending.

Funny Snowmen

We used paint and sponges to create snowmen and gave them some flair by adding hats with buttons, gems, fabric, stickers and ribbons.

Science Week

We had lots of fun during Sciience Week. We took our magnifying glasses outside to examine leaves, flowers and minibeasts in more detail. We explored the classroom using magnets. We also learned about poles in magnets and loved feeling the force as our magnets repelled each other.

Later in the week we joined our 6th class buddies again for various science experiments.

Thank you so much to Mr. Keane and everyone in 6th class who put so much work into preparing the experiments and explaining them so well to the Juniors Infants.

Our Trip to the Aquarium

On Tuesday, 4th November, Junior and Senior Infants visited Galway Atlantaquaria. We learned about lots of sharks and fish found in Irish seas and rivers and we also got to see some colourful species from warmer waters. After our tour of the aquarium our guide Tara showed us some experiments in the classroom. It was a great day!

Phonics

We have started reading in Junior Infants. So far we've learned the sounds s,a,t,i,p,n and we're now using them to read and spell lots of words.

Halloween

We had a great day celebrating Halloween. The whole school dressed up and we had a costume parade in the yard. Tríona did face paint for Junior Infants. We played musical statues, musical chairs, balloon games and had a mummy making competition and a disco. It was a great end to a fantastic first term in Junior Infants.

Halloween Art

We made spooky skeletons with our 6th class buddies.

Maths week.mp4

Maths Week

Autumn Art

We love learning about Autumn. We read a book called Leaf Man and decided to create our own leaf pictures. We also learned some interesting facts about hedgehogs and read a lovely story called Don't Hog the Hedge. We printed using beautiful Autumn colours and then followed a guided drawing lesson to draw a hedgehog to create lovely hibernating hedgehog pictures.

Playdough Monsters

One of our fine motor activities this week was creating playdough monsters. We used matchsticks, gems, feathers, pipe cleaners, googly eyes and buttons to create our monsters. We also thought of names for our monsters.

Bake Sale

Congratulations to our fantastic friends in 6th class who organised a hugely successful Bake Sale to raise money for the Community Centre roof repairs. Also a huge thank you to all the parents and children who baked and contributed so generously to this fund raising effort.

Doctor's Surgery

Our role play area has recently been transformed into a doctor's surgery. There are lots of super surgeons, doctors, nurses, radiographers and receptionists looking after our many poorly patients in Junior Infants.

Friendship Week.mp4

Friendship Week

We had a fantastic time celebrating Friendship Week in Junior Infants. On Monday we talked about the importance of being a good friend and made a poster with all our ideas. On Tuesday we read the story The Rainbow Fish and used that as inspiration for our art and SPHE lessons. We designed our own rainbow fish and then thought of lovely complements for everyone in the class. Ms. Fahy wrote the complements on sparkly paper and we added them to our fish to create a Friendly Fish display. Everyone agreed that hearing our friends say nice things made us feel very happy.

On Wednesday we joined our buddies in 6th class to make some gorgeous friendship bracelets. We even got the chance to play outside with them after.

Finally we finished the week with a Friendship Breakfast. It was lovely to share a meal and have a chat with our friends on Friday morning.

Throughout the week Junior Infants showed that they really are great friends by playing nicely together, being kind, including others and having lots of fun.

The Gingerbread Man

This week's story was the Gingerbread Man. We had lots of fun baking and decorating our own gingerbread men this week. We also celebrated Dot Day this week. We drew self portraits and had so much fun drawing ourselves that we decided to paint our friends' portraits too.

We enjoyed a visit from Colemanstown United who won the very first Galway Football Association's over 35 women's final. Well done to all the Newcastle mums on the panel!

Week 3.mp4

week two.mp4

Goldilocks and the Three Bears

Our story this week was Goldilocks and the Three Bears. We had great fun retelling the story using puppets. We also read other stories inspired by the traditional tale and talked about what version we liked and why. We also learned some interesting facts about bears and used paper plates to make our own panda/ black/ brown/ polar bears.

Welcome to our wonderful new Junior Infants

We've had a super start to the year here in Junior Infants. Take a look at the video to see all the fun we've been having.

(Please note: sometimes the video takes a minute to load.)

We're all looking forward to a wonderful year together.

to Junior Infants.mp4

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