Christmas holidays

Christmas jumpers, party, Santa, video, tidying....

We love school!!

 Happy Christmas everyone.

Nursery Rhyme Christmas Play

We saw another absolutely wonderful Christmas play.

We really loved the songs, we knew all the nursery rhyme tunes, and the new Christmas words were lovely.

Well done to the fantastic actors and actresses from Ms.Donnelan's, Ms. Hanrahan's and Ms. Halliday's classes!

 

Learning all about Hungary

 We had a wonderful talk today from Anita who is one of our mums, from Hungary.

 We found out the Hungary is roughly the same size as Ireland, but it has twice as many people living there as we do in Ireland.  It takes 3 hours to fly there.

 We were really interested to hear about horseback archery and to see photos of traditional Hungarian clothes.

 Teacher was particulary interested in Hungarial inventions: the biro, vitamin C, matches and the Rubix cube!

 The food looks delicious, and we got to try some chocolate snails which Anita made for us.

Luckily they are snail shaped, and do not actually have snails in them!

 We also really enjoyed hearing about some Hungarian traditions, especially the traditions associated with Christmas.  We are very glad we don't have to go to school in Hungary, where schools are open from 8am to 4pm.  Hungarian kids must be so smart!

 Thank you so much Anita for sharing your chocolate snails and so many interesting things about Hungary.  We hope we get the chance to visit there someday!

Electrical circuits

We were making electrical circuits today.
We found it challenging to make a circuit with two wires, a bulb and a battery.

After a bit of trial and error, and a lot of team work, we got our bulbs lighting!

Then it got even trickier.  Teacher took one wire from each group and now we had only one wire, a battery and bulb per group.  We managed to get these lighting too.

We have a great Bright Sparks 4 Kids set which we started to try out.

It has batteries, bulbs, buzzers, a motor, switches and lots of wires.

We are looking forward to trying out all sorts of interesting circuits with this kit early next week.

We will also be learning about electrical safety. 

We also talked about static electricity and we showed this in action using a balloon.

When we rub the balloon off our hair, we can then use this balloon to pick up pieces of tissue.

This works using static electricity and works well with a biro too.

We also had a chat about lightning and the dangers of electricity.

We will be very careful with the lights on the Christmas tree.

We were able to get our bulb to light by connecting the two foil sings with a metal spring and then including the angel in our circuit.

We discovered that scissors, tinfoil and some other metals are good conductors while plastic, cardboard and candy sticks are insulators and won't let the bulb light if we put them into the circuit.

We looked at how a lighthouse might work, and also at how flashing bulbs work.

Flashing bulbs would work very well in a light house.

We had a look at how an electric quiz works, though we didn't have time to make our own quiz.

Christmas angels

We made beautiful angels in class today.

We used  paints, toilet rolls or backing sheets, scissors, sticky tape, fabric, tinfoil and stars to decorate our angels.

Some of the angels are on backing sheets and make beautiful pictures,

while others will decorate the tops of our Christmas trees.

We are all very proud of our angels!