The Junior Infants have started learning their phonics sounds this week. They were working so hard this week that they even got to start their phonics book so there was great excitement in the classroom! We have been busy workers making our letters with play-doh and searching in books with our special finger lights, to name but a few of our activities!
Our amazing caretaker, Michael, is always kept busy keeping our garden looking its best and this week he was delighted to have some little helpers lighten the load!
We have just begun our novel ‘The Diary of a Killer Cat’ by Anne Fine and are thoroughly enjoying it. We use our finger lights to help us follow along while other individuals are reading.
We have heard some very expressive reading of the words by Tuffy the cat, and between all of the laughter, we have even managed to make some connections to the story. We are definitely looking forward to continuing the book and would highly recommend it so far.
We have been working on problem solving in 1st and 2nd class. The children are split into pairs or small groups. The groups are comprised of children from both 1st and 2nd class who work together to solve each of the problems.
During problem solving, we follow the RUDE strategy.
Read the question
Underline the important information
Draw a picture to help us solve the problem
Estimate what our answer will be before solving it
Problems are much easier to solve when we work in teams, and the children really are working well in their teams.
Happy Science Week!
In 1st and 2nd class we have been learning about space which provided so many opportunities for science week.
We started this week by looking at astronauts and their spacesuits. Spacesuits are designed carefully to help the astronauts survive their space adventures. Having learned about primary life support systems, control modules and much more, the children were challenged to design their own spacesuits for travelling.
We also learned about space travel and looked at the distinctive shape rockets have. We discovered that rockets are aerodynamic and the cone or point at the top of the rocket allows the air to flow more easily around the rocket to help it fly. The children then designed a spacecraft in groups that they thought would be suitable to get to space. Some of the groups found that their lego did not allow them to create an aerodynamic shape, so they designed alternative spacecrafts.
We also spent some time learning about Neil Armstrong and will learn about some more space explorers this coming week. Stay tuned for space explorer projects coming soon.
As part of science week 4th class carried out a range of fun science experiments but the one which wowed us the most was their outstanding bubble making contraptions.
In case anyone wants to make one of these fantastic bubble blowers, you can follow the procedure below:
Cut an empty drinking bottle in half.
Get a clean sock, and wrap it around the open end of the bottle.
Soak the bottom end of the sock-covered bottle in bubble mixture.
Take the bottle out of the bubble mix and blow.
Who knew design and make could be so much fun.
Nun’s Cross is filled with even more kindness than usual today as we celebrate Kindness Day. Each class has put in extra effort to be kind, to think of ways to be kind and to celebrate kindness as we believe that kindness makes the world a better place! In all of our classrooms you can see so much kindness happening from the actions of the kids and teachers to the creative displays on the walls and everywhere in between!
The Student Council proposed painting the window ledges in our school to add more colour to our beautiful garden!
Today they got to work and each window ledge was brightened up with a colour from the rainbow!
We are sure you will agree that they certainly brighten up the place! Well done and thank you to our wonderful student council!
The Junior Infants are learning all about light and dark this month and included in our topic is colours! As part of science week we have discovered that if we mix the primary colours they make new colours and these are called secondary colours. We had great fun experimenting with the colours and created colour wheel caterpillars in our classroom!
And of course it wouldn’t be science week if there wasn’t some exciting experiments along the way too!
We did the skittles experiment. Our teacher told us that she was going to add water and we had to predict what we thought would happen. Our guesses ranged from chocolate bursting out of the skittles to the water changing colour! We added the water and observed for a while and we discovered that the colour from the skittles dissolved in the water and the water turned all the colours of the rainbow!
And we had to have an explosion! We made our very own volcano. We learned about acids, which taste sour, and bases, which make bubbles! We added vinegar, which is an acid, to baking soda, which is a base and the chemical reaction made our volcano erupt!
The Junior Infants have been exploring colour as their science topic this week. They have learned about the three primary colours and today they made a colour wheel by mixing the primary colours to make secondary colours! They turned the colour wheels into a colour caterpillar for each group and they rea;;y brighten up our classroom!
The Junior Infants in Nun’s Cross are working so hard at building their phonological awareness skills before we tart learning our Jolly Phonics.
So far we have mastered listing to a variety of sounds in our environment, hearing rhyme, producing rhyme, we can count syllables in words, we know when a word is big or small and can count syllables and we can even tell you what sound different words start with!
This week we are working on training our ears to hear sounds that come at the end of the word - not that is a tricky one but we are learning really fast!
The Junior Infants have started learning their numbers this week and we began with a number hunt around our classroom and our school garden! Its amazing how many numbers we found in our environment
It has been tradition for Nuns Cross National School to support Team Hope in their Christmas Shoebox Appeal. This is an annual campaign where pupils of the school along with thousands of other individuals in Ireland donate shoeboxes filled with gifts to be given to children affected by poverty in Africa or Eastern Europe. It is an opportunity to share a little joy and excitement with children who live in circumstances where these can sometimes be in short supply.
You can read their stories at www.TeamHope.ie.
This year due to the effects of Covid-19 restrictions things are a little different and the Christmas Shoebox Appeal has gone online. People are asked to donate 20 euro to make a shoebox. Every 20 euro donated will allow Team Hope’s partners in Africa and Eastern Europe to purchase items for shoeboxes locally, which will be packaged and delivered directly into the hands of children.
Parents can send donations in with their children in an envelope and there will be collection boxes in each class which Student Council are busy making. Alternatively to make a virtual box of your own with your child you can visit www.TeamHope.ie at any time and choose the items you would like to add. You can also upload a colouring page of your own with your donation to personalise your shoebox!
Today Student Council held a whole school zoom assembly to share the great work Team Hope do. They also taught us the 4 Ws they can include in their shoeboxes - something to Wash, something to Wear, something to Write on and something Wow! We were given a tour of the website and taken through the procedure of filling a shoebox. This was followed up with a question and answer session where pupils in all classes were given the opportunity to ask any burning questions they had.
The Junior Infants are exploring the topic of light and dark this month and their play topic is Space! There is a lot of fun going on that some might say is out of this world!
We created our very own rockets so that we can blast off in to outer space!
We have made our own alien play-doh!
We followed some tricky instructions and made some very impressive UFO and Alien pictures!
We have learned all about how shadows are formed and we had great fun exploring the shadows that our toys can make. We discovered that the shadow changes depending on where the light shines from. We traced around our toys shadows and tried to guess what toys matched each shadow
We have learned all about sources of light and where light comes from. Did you know that the moon is not a source of light, but that it just reflects the light from the sun? Look at all of the sources of light that we brainstormed together! We are a clever bunch!
We have been patiently waiting and our flag has finally arrived! We are delighted and cant wait to see it flying high outside our school!
This week 5th & 6th class were tasked with making the longest possible paper chain using only one sheet of a4 paper and staples. There was great perseverance shown by the class and amazingly, the longest paper chain was over 7 and a half metres long. Very impressive work indeed!
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Today 3rd class were delighted to be commencing cricket training. Jim from Greystones will be working with us over the coming month as we learn the basics of the sport. Today we learned positions; wicket keeper, fielder, batsman and bowler. We learned to bat, bowl and to field. We had great fun learning cricket.
Running club has returned after mid-term and we are really enjoying it. On Tuesday 5th & 6th class complete their run, on Thursday 4th class run and on Friday 3rd class run. We meet at 8.30 and do a quick warm up. We find that the running in the mornings helps us to be more awake and alert for school. We are hopeful that athletics events will return in the new year and we are confident that our training will pay off for us. New members are welcome at any time.
Take a look at our impressive challenge where we used the contents of our pencil cases to balance a ruler on a glue stick. I wonder can anyone else rise to this challenge?
We had lots of fun celebrating Maths Week in 1st and 2nd class.
We were learning about shapes so were challenged to make human sized shapes using all of the people in our groups. It turns out that circles are tricky to make using bodies if you don’t want any corners.
Second class started to learn about square corners which are more commonly known as right angles. The children went on a square corner hunt around the classroom to see how many they could find.
We went on a shape hunt outside using our shape magnifying glasses. There are lots of circles and rectangles in the school grounds, but semicircles were a little trickier to find. Some very observant members of the class noticed that our neighbour, the highland cow, has a semicircular shaped nose.
We ended our week by creating some shape monsters. It was interesting to see how many corners and sides our monsters had, some even had square corners.
