Saturday 30 May 2009

Crazy Hair Day

Yesterday, May 29th, was crazy hair day in our school. We hope to raise some money towards the cost of buying interactive whiteboards for the school. We had a fantastic day. Some of the hairstyles were amazingly creative. Congratulations to all the mammies, grannies and assorted family members who would make fantastic hairdressers, and to the teachers who looked so different in their lovely hairstyles!

Thursday 28 May 2009

Maths for Fun

Today some of our Mammies and Daddies came to our class. Lisa's dad Mustafa, Daniel McNulty's mum Maura, Eoin's mum Anne Marie and Sarah 's mum Breege came to help us play Maths games. They were great fun. We played Bingo, Snakes and Ladders, Hot Dog and Colour a picture.

Snail Trail

Teacher saw these snails sliding to school in a line. There were 4 of them. They looked so eager to come to school to learn.

Africa Week

This week is Africa week. We went to the hall to see Ms. Tierney's Junior lnfant class show us a play about a day in the life of Uganda. It was so interesting. We even got to see some Ugandan dolls made from banana fibres and a ball, also made from banana fibres. In our class we are doing lots of things relating to Africa - we are painting masks, colouring an African village scene, hearing African stories and learning about some African countries. We also watched a really interesting video called Kirikou, about a small child in Africa.

Friday 22 May 2009

Being involved in the Volvo Ocean Race 09

The Volvo Ocean Race is set to arrive in Galway this weekend. We are so excited. We are following it on the internet, and seeing the sailors at sea. We even saw teddy steering a yacht. We painted our own Green Dragon yachts in class. We hope that the Green Dragon does very well in the race.

Feathery fun

Look at something interesting found at home. We have lots of questions? Where did these bird feathers come from? Was a bird in the house? What kind of bird has feathers like this? So interesting!

Thursday 21 May 2009

Apples and worms

Staying with our topic of mini-beasts, we made some delicious apples. We thought that worms might like them too so we let them eat through the apple (rather like the way the hungry caterpillar ate through all the food). They look great but we wouldn't like to eat them now!

Wednesday 20 May 2009

Making Boats

We are watching the Volvo Ocean Race on the computer (and whiteboard). We are cheering for Green Dragon and we can't wait to see the Green Dragon in Galway next week. Today we made our own boats out of marla. It was quite a challenge getting them to float. Our lumps of marla wouldn't float without being changed into a boat shape.When one of the girls figured out a great design for her boat, she showed us all how to make floating boats. Next teacher got some passengers (peas) that were willing to ride in our boats. All the pieces of marla were exactly the same size so we looked for good floating designs. Some of our boats held 21, 22 or even 42 peas! (which beats teacher's previous record of 16 passengers). Now we know more about good shapes for floating.

Monday 18 May 2009

Caterpillars, Cocoons and Butterflies

Don't forget to keep up to date on the progress of our painted lady caterpillars on http://scoilchaitrionajnrmsmcloughlin.blogspot.com/2009/04/caterpillars-and-butterflies.html

3D Butterflies

We made some marbelled paper in Art last week. Today we used this paper to make 3D butterflies. We cut out the butterflies and stuck them on to backing pages with glue only on their tummies. This means that the wings can flutter in the breeze. They almost look like real butterflies.

Friday 15 May 2009

Activities in Room 5

We have nice new activities which we were playing with today. We have games with: silly sentences, building words, word families, and 3D shape sorting. They are fun to play, and we are learning lots when we play with them.

Lifecycles

We know lots about lifecycles. We can tell you lots about the lifecycle of the frog, the butterfly, the hen, and plants. We have toys and charts we use to show others all about the lifecycles.

Thursday 14 May 2009

Oil and Water Pictures

Mrs. Newell's class came to help us with our art today. We made pictures from oil and water. We dropped a couple of drops of oil on top of a tray of water. Then we laid our white pages on top. Look at the lovely designs that we made.

Caterpillars

We have been talking about the story of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. We played games about this story on our whiteboard, and we made really nice collages of the story of The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

Our seeds have grown!


Some of the seeds we planted have really grown. Look at our wonderful broad bean and four leaf clover plants. We are so proud of them.

Water Investigations

Thursday, May 14th, 2009
Today we learned more about water. We tried some investigations. They were very interesting. We know that when water is poured it always falls straight down to the ground. We can get it to fall diagonally by getting it to run along a piece of string. The water holds on to the string using surface tension.
Next we tried some bath tricks. If you have a bottle full of water, and you turn it upside down, all the water will run out. If you turn the same bottle of water upside down, but you do this under water, the water will not run out. This is because the water in the bottle is trying to get out, but air pressure is trying to force water in the basin to go into the bottle. Neither the water in the basin nor the water in the bottle end up moving at all. We can see air pressure at work even more clearly when we get a cup filled with water, turn it upside down on cardboard, and let go. We all expected the cardboard to fall down and the water in the cup to run out, but this didn't happen because the air pressure on the cardboard prevented the cardboard from moving.
Surface Tension and Detergent: This is a great investigation you can try in the bath at home. Fill the bath with water. Make a cardboard boat and float it on the water. It will not move if the water is still. Now drop one drop of wash up liquid (or shampoo) into the water at the back of the boat. This causes the surface tension on the water to be broken and the boat will shoot forward. Be warned though: This works only once, until the bath is washed and dried again, getting rid of any detergent.
Water Races: We tried to figure out the fastest way to empty a bottle. We tried racing bottles, we tried pouring, squeezing and shaking a bottle, while racing it against a control bottle. None of these ways got the water out of the bottle more quickly than others. What we discovered is that you need to swirl a bottle of water to get the water to pour out more quickly. When you swirl a bottle, the water runs to the outside of the bottle, allowing air to push up inside the bottle. This air pushes down on the water, pushing it quickly out of the bottle.