We are really getting into the swing of things in Junior Infants and are having lots of fun learning and getting to know eachother.  

We have met 4 letters in Letterland - annie apple, claever cat, dippy duck and harry hatman.  We love coming up with words that begin with those sounds.
We know 7 sight words now and are nearly ready to begin our first little reader.
This weeks rhyme was Humpty Dumpty and our story was Elmer by David McKee.

In maths we have become expert matchers and now we are learning to sort and make sets of colour, size and type (for example - a set of red things, a set of big animals, a set of teddies).  A set is something that belongs together.  We are having fun learning this week's number rhyme - 5 little monkeys and learning how to play dice games and take turns.

In Science we have been learning to name our body parts and in Geography we have been talking about the people who work in our school - we met the principal, the caretaker and the secretaries.  We drew some lovely pictures of Mrs O'Mahoney :-) .

During our integrated learning (play) sessions we have been exploring our new areas - role play, small world, construction, sand and malleable/ creative.  In the next few weeks we will start to theme these areas to reflect what we are learning at other points in the day.

Here are a few pictures from this week - 

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What a busy week we have had in Room 8.  The children are coping very well with the long day but may be too tired to tell you everything they did.  So here is some of what we have been up to.
In the mornings we now have fine motor, numeracy and literacy activities.  These are:
Wooden Jigsaws
Threading and beads
Pegs and Paper plates
Cutting and sticking
Matching cards.

Before yard time we do integrated learning (learning through play).  This week we introduced the sand and it has been very popular.

On a Wednesday and a Thursday we do team teaching in Maths.  Ms Hourican does lots of counting games with half the class while Mrs O'Mahoney plays dice games and matching and sorting activities with the other half. 

This week we met Dippy Duck in Letterland - we are getting better and better at our writing - practice makes perfect!

We are learning to read!  We play lots of games in school to help us learn our new sight words - Danny, Zeb, Emma, Josh and Mum.  Next week we will get a word bag in our homework and we can practice our new words at home.

On Thursday we had our first full day.  We had activities in the morning and then later on we had our first Learning Through Play session.  At the moment we have a Home Corner, blocks, Duplo, straws and márla.  New areas will be introduced over the coming weeks.

On Friday we went for a walk to explore our new school.  We visited Ms Moloney's office, the library, the computer room, the hall, the yard and the staffroom!

26 new Junior Infants started their school career in Room 8 on Thursday August 27th.  They have done such a good job settling in.  Any tears dried quickly and Mrs O'Mahoney  is so proud of how well they are all doing.  Here are a few photos of our first few days in school.

I left my camera in school over the summer so apologies for the late posting of June's photos.  Good luck in Senior Infants everyone - I will miss you all!