Sinbad the Sailor Pantomime

We had a pantomime in our school today. We all went to see it. It was great fun. One of the children in our class got picked to be Captain Bird's Eye. He was terrific.

Human Number Line

We are practicing the words before and after. We are using the number line and deciding where numbers come on the line. We have a human numberline and we play a swapping game. For instance someone who has no number can swap with the person who has the number that comes before 8 etc.

Some Heat Experiments

We have been busy trying a few heat experiments. We have made spiral snakes. We coloured them and cut them out. We hung some over the radiator, beside the window, and we hung others in the middle of the room. Some of our snakes became disco dancing snakes but the others became sleepy snakes. Can you guess which were which?
That's right! The snakes over the heater move because hot air rises and move the snakes. The snakes in the middle of the room have no moving air under them so they stay still.

The next experiment we tried was holding a table tennis ball over a hair dryer. The rising hot air keeps the ball floating in the air. The experiment doesn't work with a heavy bouncy ball (too heavy for the air to lift) and with a light foam ball (too light to stay in the warm air flow so it gets knocked over very quickly).

The Planetarium in our school

The planetarium came to our school. We all sat inside it and we found out all about the sun, the stars and the planets. It was so interesting. We even made our own stars and planets in art time.In Maths we talked about what our favourite things in space are, and we made a chart. Have a look at how many of us liked the sun, the moon, planets and stars.

Meeting our President

On Thursday, November 15th Scoil Chaitríona Junior were invited to join in the 10 year celebrations of Science Week in Galway. Mrs. McAleese is the president of Ireland. She came too.

Senior Infants Room 5 went to represent our school. We met Mrs. McAleese and her husband. They are really nice. They shook our hands and chatted to us. We got to make wonderful wind turbines with Dick and Anne from Rude Mechanicals and we got a present of a lovely yellow Science Week T-shirt each. It was such a great occasion. Some of us were even on Friday's Irish Times newspaper. We were so tired after our exciting day.

Science with Eggs

It is Science Week. We did a few interesting experiments in science week. We found out that eggs sink in water, but if you add salt to the water, the egg can now float.

We know why this happens......We did another experiment that is almost the same.....Put some rice into a cup and then put a bouncy ball in the cup, and fill the cup with rice (covering the ball). Now if you shake the cup the bouncy ball will always come to the top. This is because the little rice pieces are so small that they always race to the bottom of the cup first, so the ball always ends up on top. (That's why crumbs are always at the bottom of a cornflakes box!) The eggs are the same. The salt in the water always pushes to the bottom (because it makes the water dense) so the egg ends up on top. Interesting isn't it?

We did another experiment to find out if eggs are raw or cooked. We made both eggs spin and then we tried to stop them spinning. The boiled egg is very well behaved, it stops when it is told. (It's like wearing a seatbelt in the car). The raw eggs stops spinning for a second, but spins again as soon as you take your hand away (like someone without a seatbelt in the car, keeps moving forward even if the car stops in a crash). You can spin an egg to see if it is cooked or not.

Acrobatic Clowns

We coloured some clowns and put coins on their hands. Without coins the clowns couldn't balance but when we put the coins on the clowns would balance anywhere..on our hands, on our noses and even on the top of a pencil!

Caring

We are talking a lot about caring. We talk about people who care for us and people we care for. Look at our lovely paintings of the people who care for us.

The Mobile Farm

The mobile farm came to visit our school today. We really enjoyed the visit. We got to see Rosie the Donkey, Jasmine the Duck, Cloe the Goose,Megan the black hen, Daisy the cow and her son Bob, Babe the Pig, Rodger the Rabbit and Dolly the Sheep.
We got to see and pet all the animals and some of us even had Jasmine the duck on our shoulders or our heads when she was out for her walk.

Rosie the Donkey showed us her very brown teeth. We can see why we need to brush our teeth every day, we don't want them turning brown like Rosie's.

3,2,1, Balloon Rockets

Today in our class we were talking about air. We tried to get a balloons to fly in a straight line. They never do. When you blow up a balloon and then let them go they fly in all directions.
We finally got a balloon to fly in a straight line by attaching the balloon to a string with a straw and some selotape. This time the balloon flew in a straight line. We even got the balloon to fly uphill and downhill by having one end of the string higher than the other.

Winter Trees

We went on a nature walk today to see trees in Winter. We saw evergreen and decidious trees. The decidious trees have lost their leaves now. The evergreen trees don't lose leaves in winter. We also saw black buds on the Ash tree and sticky brown buds on the Horse Chestnut tree.

Junior Achievement

Jarleth has come to talk to our class about Junior Achievement. He is a college student (studying computers and business) and he is helping us understand how important money and business is in all our lives. Today he read us a really nice story about the farm and gave us great magnets for our fridges.

Reading Acitivities

We are taking turns reading and matching words, playing twist and check phonics and keywords, playing look and find lotto and shopping list game.