Welcome to our Junior Blog Page
A very warm welcome to you from the juniors at Drung No2 National School. We hope you like our Blog
November 2021
A huge congratulations to the Drung Under 12 Football team who won the Division 3 Cup Final at the weekend, all of their hard work and practice has paid off! A special well done to our own 6th Class pupil who practiced hard and helped score points for the team, well done!!
October 2021
The Junior Room continued to have a busy month in school, we are all settling down, enjoying our work and being very careful to wash and sanitise our hands.
In English, we learned all about Harvest and Autumn. We wrapped up warm and had a walk around our lovely school grounds to find signs of Autumn, we are blessed in school to have such a beautiful garden and a lovely view!
Some of the signs of Autumn around the school, these beautiful mushrooms were growing in the shade of the wall (we know not to touch them!); the swallows have moved out of their nest and gone away for winter; we found Autumn leaves on the ground and Autumn colours on the trees; there were berries on the bushes around the school, the raspberries in the school garden are ready for harvesting.
We did some Persuasive Writing in English, we used persuasive words to try and convince people to buy our Pumpkin Soup.
Infants have been learning the letters of the alphabet, Junior Infants learn lower case letters and Senior Infants learn capital letters. They play games together in their pods with the letters:
We are a Digital School of Distinction: we use technology to help us in our learning:
Ms McBride, our Special Education Teacher, worked with 1st and 2nd Class on "Magic E" (words with an "e" at the end of them: rip/ripe, tap/tape) we had to splat the word that Ms McBride called out (we REALLY loved this game!).
We've been learning about 2D and 3D shapes: did you know that a 2D shape has two dimensions, long and wide; a 3D shape has 3 dimensions, long, wide and deep.
Junior Infants learned about the number 1.
In Gaeilge, we learned that people eat bairin breac at this time of the year. Did you know that there is a "fainne" hidden in the bairin breac?! Long ago, people said that if you found the ring, it meant you would get married soon!
While we were celebrating Monkey's birthday in September, we had some really yummy sweets that were covered in white powder, we did some investigating and discovered that the powder was cornflour. We had a bit of a class discussion about cornflour because it felt very unusual, and so, in October, we changed our plans for one Science lesson and investigated cornflour and what happens to it when you add water to it! When you mix cornflour and water, it makes a very unusual mixture called "Oobleck". The proper name for Oobleck is "A Non-Newtonian fluid". We made Oobleck in school and investigated its properties,it was a bit messy, but we had a lot of fun and made some amazing discoveries along the way. We learned that a Non-Newtonian fluid acts like water if you put your finger into it, the fluid moves apart and your finger goes down into it. But if you hit the Non-Newtonian fluid quickly, it acts like a solid and your finger won't go into it. We watched some videos on the Internet of people running on Non-Newtonian fluid!
Mixing cornflour and water to make Oobleck.
The spoon wouldn't go into the Oobleck, even though it was a liquid!
If you are fast, you can hold the oobleck in your hand like a ball.
In Science, we learned about eyes and how they work. We learned that everyone has a blind spot in each of their eyes and we learned how to find it. It's there all the time, but we don't notice it, because your two eyes help each nother to see and each eye fills in the blind spot for the other eye. We went looking for our blind spots, though, and we managed to find them!
We also learned about pumpkins in Science and in Art we worked in our pods to carve pumpkins. Did you spot them on the windows of the school?
Our Autumn art, these were inspired by the birch tree outside our classroom window.
Out and about, investigating signs of Autumn.
Happy Harvest from the Junior Room!
Did you see our collaborative art in the Anglo-Celt newspaper?
Everyone in the Junior and Senior Room worked on a piece of this art
and it was all put together to make a Harvest display.
September 2021
September has been a busy month in the Junior Room
we welcomed everyone back and were very excited to meet our new Junior Infants - they have had a super few weeks learning some new letters and practicing their pencil grip
Learning to hold the pencil like a bird's beak
In Gaeilge, we have looked back over the Irish we already new and we have been teaching it to the new infants. We try to use our Irish whenever we get a chance, teacher gives us a sticker if we use our Irish during the day (teacher's running out of stickers fast!). Our topic for this month was Me Fein - myself. We can have a chat with you in Irish and tell you how we are feeling, how old we are and we can even tell you if we have a pain. We wrote a story about Roisin and the day that she was sick.
Each class has been looking at different areas in Maths in September: we've looked back over past learning and started looking at some new topics:
The infants have been sorting and classifying: they have studied collections of items to see if they can group them according to what they have in common.
1st Class have looked back over adding: here is one first class pupil making different number sentences out of the same numbers:
All 4 classes have learned about Ordinal Numbers: Ordinal numbers tell us the place of a number in a series. We use them for birthdays, dates and for races. We learned how to decide which 2 letters go with each ordinal number: can you spot the pattern?
In art, we learned about different types of lines: straight lines, curved lines, wavy lines, zig zag lines, broken lines and dotted lines. We painted different lines and practiced painting in between them as carefully as we could. We turned our pictures into funny monsters afterwards and used our Gaeilge to give them some interesting names.
Last year in History class, we learned all about the Taoiseach: we can tell you his date of birth, where he came from and that he was a teacher before he became a politician. Did you know that his Dad was a soldier and a famous, champion boxer? We were very impressed to learn that in 2004, our Taoiseach made Ireland the first country in the world to ban smoking in work places. We were so impressed, that we wrote to the Taoiseach in Term 3 last year and were very excited to get a letter back from the Taoiseach's office! This September, our class was very fortunate to take part in a Zoom lesson and interview with the Taoiseach. We tuned in with our interactive whiteboard and learned a few more facts about the Taoiseach:
In English this month, we learned about birthdays: we can say the months of the year and tell you what month we were born in (1st and 2nd Class can tell you their date of birth). We read stories about birthdays, we loved the story about Grumpy Monkey: Party Time by Suzanne Lang (you can listen to it on Youtube here). We learned a poem about our baby brother's birthday and wrote invitations and birthday cards. Most exciting of all, our class monkey was 6 on the 24th September! We don't like to pass up an opportunity for a party, so we had a big celebration: We wrote lists of food, entertainment and decorations using bullet points and worked in our pods to decorate the classroom. We had a great day, we had treats (thank you to everyone at home who sent in treats), sang happy birthday, helped Monkey to open his gifts (he got a Jigsaw, a game of zoo snap and a banana shaped pencil case) and did monkey themed activities for the afternoon. We did all of this working in our pods and closely following our Covid-19 procedures and had a super day.
Can you spot us using our Ordinal Numbers to decorate the banner? We had to decide which ending to put after the number 6 to make sixth.
By 11:00am, the party was ready to get started! Infants had counted out 6 candles for the cake and we had a party bag for everyone.
We blew out the candles with balloon pumps to be Covid-safe! Afterwards we did lots of activities - this is the jigsaw that Monkey got.
Some of our Junior room children having a lovely day in school! Monkey looks happy too.
Afterwards, we used everything we had learned over the month and did some narrative writing to tell a story. This story was about a cake that went splat at a birthday party (not Monkey's, thank goodness!).
