Our Three Little Pigs Building Site

We all love the story 'The Three Little Pigs' in Junior Infants. The story is the basis of our theme over the past couple of weeks and we have set up a Three Little Pigs Building Site in the role play area and in small world play. When in role we explored the different materials that would be suitable for building a house - we decided that bricks, stone and cement make the best houses in Ireland because of our rainy, windy weather.

We sang the rhymes 'London Bridge' and 'This is the Way We Lay the Bricks' to help us think about materials and building. Click here for the rhymes.

We also took on different roles on a building site. There are lots of jobs on a building site, like the building site in Grangegorman. We could think of builders, managers, architects, engineers, and drivers for all the different vehicles. 

In the sand area we built houses, castles and skyscrapers and we noticed that we needed water to make the sand hold its shape.

Chinese New Year

We celebrated Chinese New Year in class this week and we learned that we are now in the year of the monkey. We found out the year we were born in - most of us were born in the year of the tiger or the year of the rabbit.
We made beautiful Chinese lanterns to celebrate!

Journeys

We are learning about journeys this week in Junior Infants. We go on lots of journeys in Junior Infants - we go to school, to the shops, to our friends' houses and on holidays. We walk, cycle, scoot, drive, go on the bus, go on trains and planes and even skip. There are many interesting things to see every day on our journey to school and we drew some beautiful pictures to show all the animals, people, buildings and parks that we see on our journey.

During a discussion about our Polar Regions theme, we watched a clip which showed penguins on a long journey in Antarctica. One group recreated the penguins' journey during group work.

Cursive Writing 'j'

One day Jude and James were in Jumpzone. They had a great time but they decided to go to Jervis to buy some jelly when they felt hungry. They went to visit the Jail but were nearly locked up by the guards by mistake! They escaped and ran to Jude's house to eat their jelly. Then they went into the back garden and jumped on the big trampoline. It was a lovely day :)

The Arctic

We have been learning all about the Arctic region in Junior Infants. We looked at pictures of animals that live in the Arctic - we saw polar bears, seals, the arctic fox, the arctic hare, snowy owls, whales, walruses, reindeer and huskies. We loved learning about how the animals use camouflage to protect themselves from scary predators. Some pupils brought in really cool stories about the Arctic and we loved listening to them.

During groups, we role played life in the Arctic by setting up camp in an igloo. We had to fish and hunt for our food. We wore very warm clothes.

Here are some people cooking fish inside the igloo.

In small world we set up a snowy scene and made animals that live in the Arctic.

In construction we built igloos and ice cafés!

In junk art we made tools for exploring the Arctic and some accessories to wear there.

We had so much fun in the messy station as we built homes for Arctic animals out of snow! It wasn't real snow but it was very cold and looked just like snow. We made it snow and built snowpeople and threw snowballs!

Cursive Writing 'o' and 't'

We are learning to write 'o' and 't' in cursive this week.

Our 'o' Story
Oskar lives in Dublin 7 and one day decided to go to the cinema to see his favourite film. After the film Oskar went for a walk all around Smithfield until he returned to the cinema. Oskar then walked to the school.

Our 't' story
Thomas lives in Stoneybatter and took a trip to the swimming pool, where he went for a lovely long swim. He then went for a walk all the way down to the park and, after playing on the swings, started to walk home. When he had finished his busy day, he put on his favourite hat!

Cursive Writing 'qu'

We started to learn cursive writing before Christmas and we're doing really well in room 1.

This is our first week back after Christmas and we've started to join our first two letters together - q and u to make the sound 'qu'.

We came up with a story about a thirsty queen who starts in the park. She travels up to her castle but gets very thirsty and travels all around the castle to look for milk. When she finds milk she goes back to the castle to drink it in peace. She then decides to go for a swim in the swimming pool so she travels down to the pool and takes off her crown before diving in. When she finishes her swim she goes to the Lighthouse Cinema to watch Star Wars. The queen loves the film so much that she travels around town to go to a different cinema to watch the film again! She leaves and starts to head to her other palace for the evening.

We can think of many words which have the 'qu' sound! We thought of queen, quack, liquid, squash and quit.