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. 

By Áine: 
On sunny days we go out to the outdoor classroom.
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By Andreea:
On Monday, we went out to the garden and we got to listen to the stream and we got to look at the bug hotel. We got to sit on the grass and we were all happy.

By Grace:
This week in school we did lots of stuff. We did our first ever origami lesson! We made monster book marks.

By Eoin:
We do P.E. every Tuesday and Thursday. I feel really happy when we do P.E. to be honest.

​By Tanzeel:
I like P.E. because it is very fun.

By Andreea:
​We got to play new yard games like Black Hold and Jailbreak!
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By Aariz:
We have been reading a book called the Magic Faraway Tree. It's full of twists and turns and weird creatures. There is also lot of weird lands and worlds. The tree is very tall and it goes up to the cloud. A lot of very strange people live in the trunk of the tree. There is a hole in the cloud which leads to a different land. 

By Zara:
Sometimes in the morning we do D.E.A.R. time which means: Drop, Everything and Read. In the classroom we have a small library with books in it and everyone borrows one book and has a bookmark. If you are finished your book, you put it in a box and after three days it goes back in the library. Our library is at the back of the classroom and we have a desk there too and a painting made by the whole class.

By Alantas:
We played a wonderful game called Last Man Standing.

Aaya:
We have been playing Last Man Standing. It has been lots of fun memorising our Maths.
Step 1: The referee will ask two people a Maths question or say a sum.
Step 2: The person who says the answer first will stay standing and the other person sits down and so on and so on until the last person standing wins!
Remember, you will not always win in this game but the most important thing is that you have fun!

By Mia:
We learned rounding in Maths. 

By Varshith:
We made a picture out of Hundreds, Tens and Units.

Wow! We are so excited to be back and school and starting Third Class! We have been busy this first couple of weeks. We have been learning new routines to help keep ourselves and others safe. We are learning to sanitise our hands regularly and we even have some handy posters in our classroom to remind us of the correct way to do it. We also have organised our classroom really well into different coloured pods. 

We did our first science investigation of the year last week! We learned how powerful soap is. We wrote the investigation up in our new science copies. Here it is if you want to try it out at home.

We also started our first class novel of the year and we are already on chapter 3! It is a very enjoyable book.

Last week, we completed our first art project. We chose to do some paintings based on the work of Wassily Kandinsky called Concentric Circles. We each created a square painting of a 2D shape of our choice and then Martha put them together on the wall to create a whole-class painting.

We have also been spending lots of time outdoors. Our school has so many lovely outdoor places. During some of our PE lessons, we have been practising different class yard games that we can play together. 

It is great to be back at school! We will add more to our blog soon to update you on other things we are doing in school!
:-)