February 2014 First Class

Welcome to spring in First Class. We are learning all about seasonal change in Geography even though some of the days this month looked more like winter than spring!

In Maths, we are learning all about the hundred square and place value from 1-99. We can now regroup and rename tens and units, woohoo!

Our Write- a- Books are nearly finished. Thanks so much to all the mums, dads, brothers, sisters, aunties, uncles, grannies, granddads and teachers who have helped in this massive project. We will have pictures here of the published books next month.

We would like to wish the Ardrahan Senior Camogie team all the very best in the All Ireland in Croke Park on Sunday March the 2nd. We drew pictures and decorated slogans to support the team, we’re all behind you!

Ms. O Doherty is on an EPV day on Friday the 28TH of February.

Happy birthday this month to three girls in our room who all, remarkably have the same birthday- they are Ellie, Béibhinn and Tara. The chair got plenty of spins that day! Tara is the granny of the group at seven years old. She got her ears pierced for the occasion, fancy!

We brought teddy in to school for Art this month. We used our teddies as inspiration to draw an oil pastel portrait. Here are our masterpieces!

February was a very busy month for us in the Middle Room. Here were some of the things we did…
Write-A-Book

We are very busy writing our books for the March 1st deadline. We have a serious bunch of authors this year as we are submitting a whopping 26 non-fiction books and only 3 fiction books; ‘Tara’s Time Travel’ -an amazing journey backwards and forwards in time, ‘Out with the Old, In With the New’ and ‘The Adventures of Jack Shaw’ . These two books are both inspired by Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. Our non-fiction books range from reports about trips to London, Cork, Cyprus, Dún Guaire Castle in Kinvara, books about cousins in Sweden, grandparents in Australia and Ireland, Kilkee, Clare, buildings around Galway and the wildlife and geography of the Galapagos Islands.
We have books about sports and hobbies; the Olympics, Tai Kwon Do, ballet, cooking with Mum, fishing and Minecraft. We have books about living things and extinct creatures; snakes and dinosaurs and two biographies of famous people, the late Nelson Mandela and Pope Francis. Timmy wrote about his favourite toys, the Smurfs and Luke wrote about farming with some gorgeous photos of his own farm included. Every time we have a finished book from an author the whole room sings “Hallelujah!” – a highlight for every young author here!

Drop Everything And Run!

We tried out an initiative being piloted by a school in Dublin to increase fitness levels among pupils. Like Drop Everything and Read (DEAR) it involves a short burst of focused activity but instead of reading we ran laps around our basket ball court…We think it’s a great idea so we will do it more often!

The Vikings

We completed some group project work on Vikings in History this month. We looked at where they came from, their beliefs, how and why they travelled, the Viking long ship, death and burial in Viking Times and Viking legends. We reported back to class in our groups, presenting the work on charts for display and building replica long ships. We had great fun and now realise what it really meant to go beserk!

 

Hockey

In PE we echoed the events of the Winter Olympics in Sochi in Russia with a little yard hockey. It was fun and the days we played it were cold enough to see our breath condense…Olympic dreams!
Holy Communion Preparations
First Communion Special Mass involved Seán,  Adam, Adam, Toby, Luke and Paul this time. They had readings and gifts to bring to the altar and showed everyone how ready they are to take the next step in their spiritual journey.
Ardrahan Senior Camogie
Ardrahan Girls Senior Camogie Team have been a big preoccupation here for many of our pupils as the excitement of their All Ireland Final Day draws near. We composed a book of poems, inspired by their achievement in reaching the All Ireland aptly called ‘We’re Blue, We’re White, We’re Dynamite!’ Many of the poems were acrostics about camogie, sliotars and the pitch. Their match, which will be played in Croke Park, on Sunday 2nd of March is against Milford, from Cork.

Irish Dancing

We finished our last lesson of the year with Louise Curran and we thank her so much for all we have learned in such a fun way!

Reading Buddies

We are beginning our preparations for Book Week. We are training the Senior Buddies who will pair and share with our Junior Buddies. We look forward to meeting author Patricia Forde, Jonathon Gunning who will entertain us with storytelling in a humorous way, our Book Fair and reading competitions and activities. We really love Book Week in our school!