School Tour - Brittas Bay

What a fantastic day at the beach for our school tour! We took off for Brittas Bay in a bright pink double decker bus! Firstly we had free play with all our friends at the beach, then we were in groups and moved to different areas for different activities; we made sandcastles and dug lots of holes, we had our snacks, we raced up and down the sand dunes, we roasted marshmallows (they were yummy!), we paddled in the sea (it was cold!), we looked at the shells and stones and we played rounders and football. We got hot chips delivered out to us and we really enjoyed them. It was lots of fun, especially when we nearly had the whole beach to ourselves! To top it all off we had ice-cream cones before getting back on the bus and heading back to school. Ms. McDonagh was very happy with how well behaved we all were. What a great day!
Have a look at some of our photos from the day.

Happy Easter!

Thanks to Harry for the beautiful Easter cake he made for the class today. There wasn't a crumb left!

Happy Easter to all! I hope everyone enjoys the break. We look forward to a very busy and exciting final term when we return!

Fantastic Foxes

Have a look at the wonderful foxes we drew today. We used oil pastels.
We have just finished reading Roald Dahl's 'Fantastic Mr. Fox' as a class novel.
We have already got lots of compliments on these fantastic foxes!

Eco Week Drama

It is Eco week this week. This morning we went to the library. We went to see a drama there by Down to Earth Theatre Company. The drama was called 'Turning the Tide'. There were 4 actors in the play. There were two seagulls called Anto and Mabel and they made fantastic sounds that sounded just like seagulls! There was a boy called Hero and an angry, mean man.

        We thought it was hilarious. The main message from the play was not to throw rubbish on the beach and that the birds and animals who live there are put at danger from all the rubbish. At the end the seagulls and Hero helped clean up the beach and stop the angry man from littering.

        We know not to litter and to Reduce, Reuse and Recycle! We really enjoyed the drama. What a busy day, we also have swimming later! We also used the tablets this morning to work on money. 

Questioning

We are also learning about the comprehension strategy called Questioning. We are still practising using this strategy in school.

If we ask questions before, during and after we read it helps us to think more about what we read, help us to organise what we are thinking and find certain information we need to help us understand what we read. If we ask ourselves questions as we read it helps us to focus on the text.

We are making up our own questions as we read. Some of these questions can be answered in the story, but some are not, and that is okay because we can read between the lines and make some predictions, or we could try and find out the answer by researching it more.

We are using 'I wonder' questions a lot. Our hand signal for this strategy is a 'W' with our hands to show 'I wonder'.

We have been enjoying a lot of books in school as we work on using our strategies. Here is one of the books we have used for questioning:

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Viorist

We are also finding that we are getting very good at using all of the strategies we have learned while we listen to a story or read by ourselves. We use our hand signals and share our predictions, connections, visualisations and questions in class. We can use these strategies to help us understand anything we read.

Watch us on News2day!

We appeared on News2day today at 4.25pm on RTE Two!
We had such an exciting day taking part in the 'Alice in Litterland' workshop and then we met Conor from News2day who recorded parts of the workshop and found out information about it.

Here is a link to Friday's news if you missed it. We are so proud. Well done to everybody! Enjoy watching!

Mad as a Hatter!

We have been busy turning everyday items from the recycling bin into imaginative hats!

Photos and more information to follow soon . . .