The summer reading buzz

Ballybane library are running a super summer reading programme called the summer reading buzz.

Today we dressed up as bees and we visited the library to learn all about it.

We had a wonderful time at the library.

We got all the information we were hoping for, we heard a super story called "The huge bag of worries", we read books, played with toys, did jigsaws, coloured some pages and chatted to the lovely librarians.  They were sooo nice to us.

On our way home we ran through the field and we had a little picnic of bees (yes, bees! .....ones made of white chocolate and jellies that Una the librarian had made especially for us.)

Thank you Una, Siobhán and Robbie for beeing so nice to us today.

We really look forward to reading lots of books over the summer holidays.

School uniform sale

Father's Day art

We made lovely cards and monster bookmarks for Father's Day on Sunday.

We hope our dads will like them.

Senior Infant sports day

In spite of the drizzly weather we had a wonderful sports day.

Have a look at the photos of our sports day and also of the main prizewinners.

We were so proud of ALL our athletes today!!

Tom the wing man!

Tom is usually the bird man.

He knows all about birds (and he is really good at origami too).

Today he came to our class to tell us all about Irish butterflies, moths, flies and bees.

We really enjoyed learning all about the bugs around us.

We especially liked learning how to make origami butterflies.

We love hip hop!

Fabiane is such a great teacher.

We really love our hip hop classes!

Tour to Loughwell Farm

We had such an amazing tour to Loughwell Farm today.

The weather was just perfect and we had so much fun with our friends.

More photos from our great day out.

Dina school graduation

We had our Dina School graduation yesterday.

Wally was there, and all our families came to see the graduation.

Each of us had our own part which we did really well.

Our teacher and our parents are so proud of us.

Thank you Wally for the lovely certificates, stickers and treats.

Games on the field

We took advantage of the beautiful sunshine yesterday to play paired games on the pitch.

We played horseshoes, frizbees, lacrosse, sticky ball,

egg ball, skipping and lots of throw and catch games.

We love games!

Mini beast hunt

We really enjoyed our mini beast hunt yesterday.

We can tell whether a bug is an insect or not.

A bug with 6 legs and 2 parts on his body is an insect.  Otherwise it is not an insect at all.

Cocoons in the butterfly garden

All 5 of our caterpillars are now in their cocoons.

We gave each cocoon a name before transferring them to our butterfly garden.

We can't wait for them to emerge as beautiful Painted Lady butterflies.

The fire engine at school

We had a very exciting visit from Fireman Mark today.

He brought the fire engine to school for us all to see.

He gave us a wonderful talk on fire safety

and he let us wear his helmet and squirt his hose.

Now we all want to be a fireman or firewoman when we grow up!

Making bees

We made lovely bees in art yesterday and today.

We painted toilet rolls, added wings and antennae and made a headband each to hold our bees.

We will bring our bees with us when we visit the public library because this year the theme for the summer reading programme is:

Reading Buzz!

We will take our bees up to learn all about the summer reading programme.

We have a cocoon!

One of our 5 caterpillars is now in its cocoon.

Fun at PE

After a fun game or two of dodge ball we tried out some PE stations.

We had fun with ribbon balls, quoits, skipping ropes, circus equipment and skittles (bowling).

Watch out in case we join a circus!

Caterpillar update

Our caterpillars at 2 weeks!

Boats galore

We had a great time talking about boats today.
We have already looked at things that float and things that sink.
The big shell surprised us; it was big and heavy but it floated fine.
Teacher gave us each a sphere of marla.
We found that it sinks.
Now we tried making this marla into a floating boat.
It was quite a challenge, but we did it in the end!

Next we competed to see how many passengers each boat could safely hold.
We recorded and then compared results.
Our best boat could safely hold 28 passengers!
When every pair had a turn we lined up the boats according to the most passengers each could hold.
The most interesting discussion of all was the one in which we tried to find out why some boats won't float at all.
We decided that it is best to have a boat with a thin bottom, high sides and  no holes.
When we fixed the sinking green boat so that it became a boat with a thin bottom, high sides and no holes it floated very well.
Now that we are such expert boat makers we each made a boat out of clay.
We know that these will not float (because the clay absorbs water) we went about making our favourite kinds of boats.....submarines, boats to hold snowmen, boats with sails, cruise ships etc.
We are really interested in boats now!

Mrs. Browne's garden

We had a lovely remembrance mass for Mrs. Browne yesterday, after which we dedicated our school garden.  We love the plaque that our wonderful caretaker Mike made.

Every time we visit the garden we will remember our teacher and friend Mrs. Browne!

Hen and chicks in school

Ms. McGrath brought us a hen and lots of gorgeous fluffy black and yellow chicks from her farm today.

It was so exciting to see them in school.
We loved the way the mother hen pushed all her little chicks under her wings when she was worried about them.  What a lovely mum!