Just before the winter break, we learned a little about similes, metaphors, onomatopoeia and personification. We used our new knowledge to write senses poems about winter that are full of lovely images and feelings that really help the readers to enjoy them. Some of us recorded our poems to share here. We hope you enjoy listening to them! 

We were very excited to put our finished rocks out into our school garden this week. We really enjoyed the project.
​Thank you Student Council for suggesting it.
:-)

We have just finished our rock art project. The student council have organised that the whole school participate in an Our School Rocks project. Each child in the school will bring a rock to school and decorate it. We will then place the rocks in our school garden. We really enjoyed painting our rocks this week and we have them ready in our classroom to put in the school garden soon.

We have been really enjoying our Big Cat readers. Martha gives each group a new book on a Monday. On Thursday, before we give them back to Martha, we each get a chance to read some of our book to a buddy. It is a great chance for us to practise our reading and to hear our classmates read as well.

We finished our diaries! Here are a couple for you to have a look at. We hope you enjoy them.
:-)

We have had a great week in school together. This week we have been reading about a real life Irish giant called Patrick Cotter O' Brien who lived over 200 years ago and was 3 metres tall! Learning about Patrick inspired us to imagine that we were giants. First we drew pictures of what interesting and strange things we could do as giants. Then we did some drama together in our pods. We created imaginative scenes in which we acted as giants and we showed our performances to the class. They were really funny! After that, we borrowed ideas from every performance to create a timeline of the day in the life of a giant. We imagined a giant on their first day of school with people who were much shorter than them. We planned and wrote out giant diary entries. They are sounding great and are almost finished! We will share them with you next week.

In our Maths lessons we have started learning about lines and angles. We learned about vertical, horizontal and parallel lines. We used this knowledge in our art lesson. We used our ruler to draw lines to create some very cool pictures. Check them out.

We all really enjoyed our mid-term break and we were delighted to be back in school again this week. We had a busy week. We moved into new pods this week. Now we can spend a few weeks working with some different classmates. It is fun to learn with different classmates. 

This week we have been using positive affirmations to start and end our days. It is important to say kind and positive things to ourselves every day. We wrote down some of our favourites in our copies and each of us created a self portrait and surrounded it with positive affirmations to remind ourselves how great we are!

This week we did lots of work with our dictionaries. We are getting really quick at finding words in a dictionary and we practised writing down their definitions. We checked the definitions of our spellings words and this helped us with our home learning.

In History, we have been learning about communications. First we made a mind map of all of the different ways that we could think of that humans use to communicate today. There are lots! Then we looked at the different ways humans have developed to communicate with each other throughout history. We have started a little communications timeline and next week we are going to focus on different parts of the timeline. 

Today, we had our first Golden Time in our new pods! It was great fun and we really enjoyed playing and talking to our teammates. What a great end to a great week! 

Today we finished our rainbow drip art class display and we packed our gratitude letters into envelopes to bring home! We have been practising gratitude for the last couple of weeks in our classroom. We practise gratitude by taking time to notice and talk about the things and people that we are grateful for. We decided to each write a letter to somebody in our lives that we want to thank and we are really looking forward to delivering them. Enjoy our pictures! 

We have been learning about matter in third class. We know that matter is anything that takes up space. There are three states of matter, solids, liquids and gases. We have been doing different investigations in our classroom to find out more about matter and we have linked our investigations to our artwork. 

Some of the properties of liquid include that they drip and flow. We used this property to create some drip art masterpieces. We added water to poster paint to make the liquid less viscous and more drippy. Check out our beautiful rainbow rain pictures below. 

Gases are hard to see and we wanted to find out if it they actually take up space. We carried out a science investigation using a plastic bottle, a balloon, bicarbonate of soda and vinegar. We mixed the powder and vinegar together in a plastic bottle. Then we quickly put the balloon over the bottle. The two ingredients reacted and fizzed. The reaction created a gas which filled up the balloon. Look at our photos to see how we got on. 

Lastly, we have been discussing how states of matter can change. We talked a lot about water. Usually we see water in its liquid state but we know that if water is frozen it changes to a solid state and become ice. If it is heated it will turn to its gaseous state and become steam. We tested this idea with another solid. Martha used a hairdryer to create hot air and aimed it at some crayons attached to a piece of card. The heat caused the crayons to change from a solid state to a liquid state. We used a camera to watch the change up close on our interactive whiteboard. When the hairdryer was taken away the drips turned back into solid. We created some more rainbow art with its drips! You can watch a video of the change below and look at our before and after pictures.

We love learning and performing poetry in our class and are building up quite the repertoire! Here is one of our favourites, Mo Mhála Scoile. ​We hope you enjoy it!

Our art project is based on the American artist called Roy Lichtenstein. We tried to mimic Roy Lichtenstein. We have been creating a piece of art from his ideas of pop art. The art is like comic book art. Roy used onomatopoeia words in his art like, bang, boom, splash, whoosh and things like that. Instead, we made a slight change and used positive emotion words in our art like, zest, peace, love, happiness, joy, pride, hope," and so on. It has been fun to be doing the art and all of the class pictures were great! Have a look at our display. It is filled with colours.