A Fabulous February
We have been continuing our work on the 60s over the last few weeks and I have to say that this has been one of our favourite topics so far! We are very excited to move onto our new topic this term entitled, The Emerald Isle! (The children came up with this one themselves)
English
In English we drafted, edited and published book reviews of our favourite children’s books to recommend to future 5th Class students. We are eagerly awaiting for our work to be bound into a proper piece that we can store in our class library. We also continued our class novel on Tom Crean and will continue to do so this term also!
Maths
In Maths we did a LOT of division. We did lessons on estimating, dividing using decimals, dividing using multiples, dividing by 2-digit numbers, learning new methods such as repeated subtraction and chunking and finally, long division. The children worked very hard in all lessons and have really impressed me with their contributions during this topic.
Gaeilge
During our Irish lessons, we linked up with what we had been doing in English and focused on movie reviews and going to the cinema. During our topics: An teilifís – Scannáin iontacha / Ag an bpictiúrlann, we used what we had learned about descriptive language and providing opinions to do some film reviews and character descriptions as Gaeilge!
SESE
Following on from the work we did on electrical circuits, we talked a lot about electrical appliances in the home; how they work and how to be safe around them. Some of us investigated how our toasters, microwaves and plugs work and found some very interesting results!
We had a lot of fun learning about the different equipment used to measure the weather. We learned a lot of new vocabulary and made our own versions of weather instruments. We then used these to observe the weather patterns over the course of a week. The best part, however, was presenting our findings using bar charts and PowerPoints and creating a retrospective weather forecast to perform to the class. The children were so resourceful and creative during this mini project and worked independently with hardly any input needed from me at all!
In our history lessons we had a look at games and pastimes of the children who lived long ago. Some of the games are really fun and are still played today. We had a go at some of them in class! We also brought in some artefacts from the past to display in our Class Museum. We loved sharing the bits and bobs that we had in our houses from over the years.
PE
We continued with our Olympics competition right until the end of the term and practised our throwing skills – the hammer throw, javelin and shotput. We also had a go at choreographing some amazing dances as well as learning some routines in class that focused specifically on dance moves popular in the 1960s. These moves came in handy during our 60s dance part on the last day!
Art, Music and Drama
During our Music and Drama lessons, we learned some more songs from popular 60s musicals like The Sound of Music. We even composed our own ‘Favourite Things’ song! We learned about the Beatles in detail and learned ‘Imagine’ by John Lennon. We had so much fun using our bodies as percussion instruments and composed a piece based on the percussion performances by the STOMP group on YouTube. As usual, the Art lessons were a massive highlight and we had lots of fun creating , Valentine’s Day cards using our ICT skills to make digital art, Valentine’s Day origami, and of course, our tie-dye t shirts that we got to wear to our 60s party. They were fabulous!
Learn Together / SPHE
The Learn Together theme for the month of February was Cooperation and we made sure to have this as a focus with lots of group projects in our day-to-day work in class. In response to this and in line with our ‘Incredible Edibles’ project, we developed our citizenship and awareness of living in the local community by visiting our local greengrocer in Stoneybatter. The owner was so friendly and helpful and answered all our questions about food origins and local produce. We even got some free cherries from the Netherlands! We will continue to explore this concept of our class and our school as a community throughout the year.
