This week all of our classes read the story of Thanksgiving with their teachers. We talked about what we are thankful for. The children then responded with some lovely Artwork. Check out how we got on below!
Second Class had fun thinking about and designing a jumper for Ryan Turbidy for tonight’s Late Late Toy Show.
We also learned about the history of the Toy Show and how it has been airing for 47 years!
Each year has a theme and we made a few predictions about what tonight’s might be!
Our favourite parts to learn about were the performances, the special guests and of course the toys!
Second class had a lot of fun learning about time last week. We became very secure in the concept of how long a minute is.
We estimated how long it would take us to do certain things in 1 minute. Some of the things we estimated were how many jumps we could do, how many times we could run the length of the yard or how many long steps we could take in one minute.
It was a lot of fun and we got fresh air and exercise while practising our counting skills, our estimation skills and developing our understanding of time.
This week in Harcourt Terrace all the classes celebrated Science week. The children all became scientists in their classrooms. Let’s see how they all got on!
Science Week in Second Class:
Second class learned all about Energy this week. They learned about different types of energy such as solar energy, wind energy and electricity. We begin to understand how everything around us is made of atoms – both positive and negatively charged. Sometimes with a bit of friction these atoms can become charged! This is called Static Electricity.
We completed an experiment on the power of Static Electricity. We investigated weather a balloon charged with static electricity could attract different materials. Our two items for our experiment were salt and rice krispies.
First, we made a prediction on what we thought would happen. We completed the experiment and recorded our results with diagrams just like real Scientists do!
First class:
First Class really enjoyed Science week. We did lots of experiments.
We used food colouring to show how plants absorb water up their stem. We checked our heart rate after resting and after moving to see how much it changes. We made paper helicopters and got them to fly and spin!
Finally, we worked in teams to build ramps that our toy cars can speed down. We figured out ways to make our cars go fast and slow on the ramp, and even tried to build a really long ramp in our classroom! Here are a few pictures of our ramps.
Junior and Senior Infants:
Junior and Senior Infants were busy building rockets, making snowman coats and having a Science show and tell.
Tony & Ronnie’s class:
Tony and Ronnie’s classes made Volcano’s erupt, experimented with magnets and Checked what floats and what sinks. They also made a bottle of coke explode with some Mentos!
Everyone in Harcourt Terrace E.T.N.S learned about and celebrated Diwali with all of our friends. Have a look and see how everyone got on below:
In Second class the children spent the week learning about Diwali. They read the story of Rama and Sita and learned about Diyas. During Diwali homes are decorated with Diyas and the candle light symbolises goodness and light winning over darkness. We drew and decorated our own Diyas.
The next day we learned all about Rangoli Art and how during Diwali families decorate outside their home with coloured sand in beautiful patterns. We used dyed rice to create our own Rangoli Art on our classroom tables. We absolutely loved this and had so much fun!
In Siobhán, Tony, Ronnie and Jennifer’s classes the children had fun hearing the Diwali story, watching some lovely candle lights and creating some nice Artwork.
We would like to wish everyone a very happy Diwali and we hope that everyone enjoys the celebrations.
The Harcourt Terrace team.
Today we had a very special Halloween assembly where everyone came together to sing, dance and chant. Some very lucky pupils picked up a Principal’s Award for lining up really well in the morning before school. There were some fantastic costumes on show in the school today. Thank you to everyone who put so much time into making today so enjoyable for the children. At the end of assembly had a Halloween march around our yard to show off all the wonderful costumes. Check out the photos/videos to see all the fun we had.
Have a lovely Mid-term break everyone and see you all again soon,
The Harcourt Terrace E.T.N.S team.
We have had a busy 8 weeks in Second Class with lots of learning and lots fun!
In English we have nearly finished two full novels! We have read George’s Marvellous Medicine and are almost finished The Twits, we have used these novels to develop skills such as prediction, character description, persuasive writing, rhyming and more! We can now confidently use adjectives, verbs and adverbs in our writing. Check us out here working in our groups to brainstorm adjectives to describe those terrible Twits!
It was lovely to finish off our Maths learning this term with Maths week. We had a lot of fun playing maths games in the morning to practice our skills such as skip counting, patterns, place value and 2D and 3D shapes.
In Art this term we have been looking at the artist Picasso. He is from Spain and his very first word was pencil! We have been learning all about his style of art known as “Cubism”. We have created our own Picasso style Cubism masterpieces!
We have been working very hard on our spelling skills this term. To improve our phonological awareness we have been using counters in our English Stations to count the sounds in our words. We count the sounds using counters before we write and then spell the word carefully. It has been working really well!
Finally in Learn Together we have been looking at recycling and plastic use. Check out our posters we made in pairs to remind ourselves and our school community to reduce our plastic use where possible.
This is just a snippet of the amazing learning happening in our class and there is much more to come!
We are looking forward to a week of rest before kicking off the second half of term 1!
First Class have really enjoyed Maths Week. We did lots of Maths activities: we played a Shape Race game, we played a numbers game in PE, we did lots of work with cubes, we read stories that included maths, and we even did a Maths Trail around the school in teams! Today we read a story about a survey and then we conducted our own surveys in the class, using tallies. It’s been great fun and we are all using our Maths Eyes everywhere we go!
During the months of September and October Tony’s class were very busy settling into the new school year. We learned all about the season of Autumn. We played lots of games and joined in some hurling coaching sessions. We sang some action songs like “Tony chestnut” and heard some lovely stories like “The gingerbread man” and “Chicken licken”. Have a look at the lovely photos below to see how much fun our classroom is.
STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.
Once a month we complete a STEM challenge to stretch our learning.
In September we completed the Paper Chain Challenge. Everyone was given the same materials: a piece of A4 paper, a scissors, and a glue. The challenge was to create the longest possible paper chain.
We had to think about what was the best approach to this challenge – long strips? Wide strips? Big loops? Small loops? We problem solved as we worked and ended up with some very long paper chains!
