What fun we had preparing for and learning all about Halloween.  Last Friday we came to school in our costumes and had a spooky day!  We made patterns using our treats and ourselves, drew monsters, went on a Halloween/ Autumn trail, watched some Halloween cartoons, sang our spooky songs and played some games - snap apple (no pictures of this - I was holding the apples!), bobbing for marshmallows, conker races, pin the nose on the monster and scary musical statues!

We had a lot of children absent this week.  I hope you are all feeling much better, we missed you and we are looking forward to having you all back for our last week before mid-term.

We learned a new game in PE this week - saucers and domes - and played some of our old favourites.  Lots of fun was had in our Learning Through Play sessions and some great spells were written in the Role Play area.  In maths we became expert sorters and came up with lots of our own rules for our sorting trees.  And on Tuesday we went to St Cronan's Church with all the Junior and Senior Infants for our Harvest Service.  Thank you to all the families who sent in something for the less fortunate in our parish

Every morning between 9 and 9:20 we have English and Maths Learning Activities.  This is an important part of the day where the children work independently on tasks to improve fine motor skills and consolidate Numeracy and Literacy work done in class.  I would encourage parents to try and have their child in school as close to 9am as possible so they can partake.  This fortnight our activities are:
Jigsaws
Cutting
Peg patterns
Threading boards
Numicon

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Our themes this month are Autumn and Halloween.  In our Role Play Area we have a spooky castle and we are having lots of fun making potions and dressing up.
Our sand is an Autumn sensory box with lots of conkers, shells and pine cones.
Creative area is where we have Autumn and Halloween playdough mats.
Our small world area is letterland and our construction area is Mobilo.
We are learning our Plan -Play - Review model where we chat in our groups to plan our play and afterwards report back to the class or a partner what we did.
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This week we were sorting with our sorting bags.  We worked in pairs to make sets of objects.  We are getting much better at writing our letters  - lots of practice at home will help with letter formation.
We have been learning all about Autumn.  Here are some of our beautiful Autumn trees.
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On Monday, as part of our PE lesson we tried out some Yoga for the first time.  We did the story of Squish the Fish with Cosmic Kids Yoga.  We practiced lots of poses and started and ended our session with the "namaste" pose!#
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I do my best to take some photos every day.  It's not feasible for every child to be photographed doing every activity. Also, some children naturally shy away from the camera or may be out of the room with another teacher at the time the photos are taken. I try to get a fair balance of children/activities.

I finally remembered to bring my camera to PE but only managed a few photos!  For September and October we are working on the Games Strand and playground games in particular.  So far we have learned to play - Freeze, Ship Sea Shore, Duck Duck Goose, Beans on Toast, Rabbit in the hole and Shopkeeeper Shopkeeper.
We made practice hedgehogs with playdough on Wednesday as we will be making clay hedgehogs next week.
We had lots of fun at integrated learning time and are looking forward to some new play areas for October.
We also got new seats on Thursday and we are busy getting to know our new friends.