What an amazing day we had last Friday for Sports Day. It was a lovely community event and we loved having parents and guardians there to cheer the children on and share in the fun of the day.
It was a day of sunshine, sports, fun, bubbles and ice-cream! Some of our favourite things here at HTETNS!
Check out this video with a selection of pictures from the day showcasing our amazing students in action.
We are so lucky at Harcourt Terrace to be partaking in the Creative Schools initiative this year.
We have had a wonderful two weeks enjoying a range of fantastic activities guided by our creative associate Bethan Parkes.
From K-Pop workshops to painting the walls of our school creativity has been flowing all over the school!
We started our Creative Fortnight with a drama workshop with Janine. The children absolutely loved this and so much fun trying out different kinds of drama skills. Each class worked on something different which gave the teachers lots of ideas to share and try out again!
Next we moved on to some visual art with Bethan! We created circles to display in our school lobby, we experimented with types of painting, explored different materials, we worked with geometric shapes, and got to work painting the walls of our school making it bright and beautiful.
The next time you visit our school keep your eyes peeled for some of this beautiful art around the building!
Our next creative activity was a K-pop workshop with Orna. This was something new for a lot of our students and they absolutely loved it. It was so much fun moving to the music and expressing ourselves through dance!
1st, 2nd and 3rd class also got to experiment with different instruments thanks to David who ran a workshop for our students with some of his own musical instruments.
Finally, we worked on our whole school project of creating bunting to display in our school. Each child in our school created their own individual piece which will be all tied together to represent our unique and individual school community. The children really enjoyed working with fabric and decorating their piece however they liked.
We ended the two weeks with a special performance from the Army Band. We got to learn about all the different instruments in the band and listen, sing and dance to some amazing music.
What a wonderful two weeks of music, dance, art and creative expression we have had! We are very thankful to be a part of this initiative and a special thank you to our Creative Associate Bethan and Ronnie and Siobhán who have facilitated and supported the organisation of these amazing experiences.
Today Senior Infants took a walk to our local Post Office in Rathmines. We posted our very own letters and we had great fun!
We had lots of practice this term in our Post Office Role Play Area so we knew exactly what to do. We had practiced our writing skills, addressed letters, stuck on stamps, delivered them to our friends and role played lots of different scenarios in the Post Office.
This week we worked on writing a letter to send to a family member and got our letters ready with our address and stamp on them. We set off this morning walking carefully through Rathmines to the Post Office.
When we got to the Post Office we met the Post Office Manager Gary who was happy to tell us all about what they do everyday and answer all our questions. He assured us that our letters we posted today would arrive by tomorrow! He told us about how all the letters go to the sorting office and get sorted into Dublin 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 etc. Most of our letters are staying in Dublin 6 so we are making it very easy for the sorting office!
We had a lot of fun going to the counter to hand over our letter to Chloe who stamped them with the official Post Office stamp!
We had great fun today and learned even more about how the Post Office works!
Senior Infants had a lot of fun in October learning all about Animals!
In Aistear, our role play area was the vets clinic, we had lots of fun performing check ups, checking temperatures, administering injections, performing X-rays and checking heart rates. We practiced our writing skills by booking appointments and filling in forms about our patients.
We had lots of fun in our under water scene in our tray too! We learned the names of some sea animals and played amazing imagination games!
In construction we built amazing homes for animals!
In English we read lots of books about Animals. We focused on Dear Zoo. We sequenced the story, wrote letters to the zoo and painted the animals from the story.
In Maths we were working hard on the idea of two parts making a whole! We practiced adding to parts to make a whole and we used our animal friends to help us.
We had a great month learning about animals and incorporating it into as many subjects as we could!
Senior Infants have been very busy this month! Learning and having fun. We have continued our theme of “Homes” and really enjoyed linking our learning through our play.
Check out what we have been up to!
Our home corner turned into a birthday party which was a lot of fun. We got to practice writing invitations, party lists and make birthday cards at the creative station.
We even got to practice some fine motor skills by wrapping up presents for the birthday party!
In English we read the stories of The Three Little Pigs. We sequenced the story and retold it to our friends.
In our creative station during Aistear we created a retelling of the story. We made the different types of houses and tried labelling our pictures.
We got to try out the new calm area on the playground and had fun on the trampolines and swing!
In Maths we have been using our manipulatives to practice making groups from 1-5. We have also been revising our number formation and our rhymes to help us remember how to write them correctly.
In Aistear we played number blocks and made the numbers ourselves!
We also continued our theme of Homes in construction where we made all kinds of interesting homes!
We have kept practising our cutting skills remembering to say “thumb on top, chop chop chop”
We even tried printing with lego !
Senior infants have been very busy since we returned to school, learning and having lots of fun too! Our theme this month is “Homes” so we tried to incorporate that into a lot of our learning activities. Check out a few snippets of what we have been up to!
We have been doing lots of fine motor tasks during morning activities to get our hands nice and strong for writing.
In art we drew self portraits!
In English we learned the story of Hansel and Gretel – we designed our own ginger bread house and learned what characters and settings were!
In aistear we had a lot of fun in the home corner!
We had lots of messy fun pouring, measuring, emptying and imagining we were baking at the tuff tray!
In small world we played with different types of homes including animal homes!
We built and designed some really cool types of homes in Construction!
We have been very busy and looking forward to lots more learning next week!
Have a look at what we have been up to recently!
Science and STEM:
In Science, we investigated floating and sinking and how and why a boat floats. We made our own boats out of paper, some were successful and some were not but we learned a lot!
We did a STEM challenge where we used only one piece of paper to create a column that would hold up the heaviest books in our class. We all used different strategies and really used our engineering brains!
In Maths we had a lot of fun recently doing a Maths Trail in our car park. We collected data on the colours of cards, the make, the year and what county they came from. All of the cars in our carpark were from Dublin except for one from Kerry! Black was the most popular colour and Ford was the most popular make of car.
In Learn Together we recently learned about the Buddhist festival of Wesack. We made lanterns to celebrate this festival and learned about the life of Buddha.
During Autism Awareness month our class word was “Inclusion” we created a collaborative e sign to represent this.
Finally, during May we wrote some Poems check some of them out here!
April 22nd is the official date of Earth Day and today second class learned all about the theme of this year’s Earth Day “Invest in the planet”.
We learned that this could mean investing our time, energy and resources into making the earth a better place to live.
We made promises to the earth on what we would do to invest in the planet!
We came up with some great ideas check them out here.
Well-being week is off to a great start in second class!
We started the week by making our well-being choice boards. We have been using these throughout the day and letting one person choose a well being activity for the whole class from their choice board. So far we have had some extra movement breaks, arts and crafts and some Pokémon drawing!
We have also been enjoying our 5km running challenge. We have run a kilometer a day so far. We figured out that if we ran 5km it would be like nearly running all the way to Sandymount beach!
11 laps of our playground is 1km!
by Friday we will have run 5km!
We have lots more fun activities planned for our well-being week and are enjoying it a lot so far!
Second Class have been learning about the abstract artist Jackson Pollock.
We learned all about his famous drip painting technique and got to try it out for our selves. It was messy but a lot of fun!
Like real artists we came up with names for our pieces and labeled them! 
Next we moved on to using the Jackson Pollock inspired methods to create a “Crazy Hair” piece. We drew and designed the body and to create the hair we used straws to blow water colours in all different directions.
We are very proud of our finished pieces!
