1916 Celebrations

This was a very special year in Ireland as we celebrated the 100 year anniversary of the 1916 Rising. We had a special ceremony outside with the whole school and parents. We raised the flag and sang Amhráin na bhFiann. We read the 1916 Proclamation and the new 2016 Proclamation we wrote as a whole school.

Junior Infant Newsletter 3rd November 2015

Welcome back to everyone after midterm break. We’re delighted to see the children back with happy faces and ready for lots of work!

We have a busy term ahead!  

For the next fortnight we will be covering lots of new things such as learning:

*       New sounds: ‘c’, ‘e’, ‘h’, and  ‘r’.

*       New sight words: Look, at, the, my, look, I, am, like

*       How to write the letter ‘a’

*       Number 2

We are starting to learn all about animals. For the next fortnight we will be learning about animals that hibernate and pets we can have.

Useful Vocabulary Winter    Autumn    hibernation    hedgehog   squirrel    nuts    gathering food      squirrel nest or ‘drey’     hedgehog  nest Cat    kitten   dog  puppy   rabbit    hamster    guinea  pig    bird    goldfish      snake     turtle      tank     aquarium     cage   hutch     bed       bowl    lead       collar

Some rhymes to practice at home:
Mary had a little lamb	Little Bo Peep
Hickety Pickety	I have a pet (Super simple songs available on youtube)

How you can support your child’s learning: Literacy: *       Find things around the house/ in books that start with our ‘s’,’a’, ‘t’, ‘i’, ‘p’ and ‘n’ sounds   as well as our new sounds ‘c’   ‘e’    ‘h’   and ‘r’. *       Cut out pictures from magazines/ brochures/ leaflet with this sound *       Look for this sound in the environment (on signs, in books) *       Encourage your child to practice writing their name and the letter ‘c’ at home Numeracy: *       Practice counting to 5 *       Find things that are pink and orange *       Find 2D shapes in the environment: circles, squares, triangles, rectangles *       Encourage your child to do sorting and matching activities at home: using pasta, toy cars, toy blocks, or socks!  S.E.S.E. *       Talk to your child about winter  and hibernation: what is hibernation? What animals hibernate? Why do animals hibernate? Look for signs of hibernation (squirrels collecting nuts) *       Maybe you could help hibernating animals at home: visit http://www.dspca.ie/   to find out how you can help hedgehogs at home *       Talk to your child about animals we keep as pets. Talk about the different ways we have to care for our pets (food, bed, play time, walks, bringing to the vet). *       If you have a pet bring in a photo to show the class!

Reminders:

Ø Please return homework folders and nursery rhyme kits each day.

Ø If your child is absent please ring the office so we can record any explanations.

Ø Encourage your child to put on and take off their coat independently- this is an important skill to be learnt as the weather begins to get colder!

Junior Infant Newsletter 7th September 2015

A big welcome to all of the new Junior Infants boys and girls (and their parents!).

The children are settling in well to school and it is great to see lots of lovely smiley faces coming in to school every morning.

We have been very busy in school already:

• *       In Maths we have been learning about the colour red and how to sort materials by colour. We are also learning number rhymes ‘5 Little Monkeys’ and ‘One Little Finger’. We are also beginning to count up to 5.
• *       We have been doing lots of fine motor activities to get us ready for writing.
• *       In English We are learning lots of nursery rhymes like ‘Incy Wincy Spider’, ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’, and ‘Humpty Dumpty’. We are also learning how to write our names.
• *       We are doing lots of colouring and trying our best to stay inside the lines and use lots of different colours

For the next week we will be learning all about our bodies and how we grow and change.

Vocabulary: The body: arm     hand     head    eyes    ears   nose    mouth   chin   hair    neck    cheeks    shoulders  knees   elbows     toes     feet     legs     back       stomach Growing: Baby  toddler    child    teenager     adult      elderly      growing    big    small

How you can support your child’s learning: *       Talk to your child about things they can do now that they could not do when they were a baby ( riding a bike, writing their name, feeding themselves, dressing themselves) *       Encourage your child to be more independent by getting them to do things for themselves (putting on and taking off their coat, dressing themselves, opening and closing their lunchbox, tidying up their toys, feeding themselves) *       Show them pictures of them as  a baby and discuss all the changes that have happened *       Go to the library and find books about the body and growing up.

Nursery rhymes to practise at home:

Incy Wincy Spider	Humpty Dumpty
Baa Baa Black Sheep	Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes
If you’re happy and you know it	2 Little Dicky Birds
5 Little monkeys	1,2,3,4,5 Once I caught a fish alive
One Little Finger	Hokey Pokey

These rhymes can all be found on Youtube or on our class blog  on the right hand side. 

Notices:

*       Junior Infant Parent Introduction Meeting is on Wednesday 9^th September at 11am in the school hall

*       From Thursday 10^th September Junior Infants will finish at 1.40pm every day. Please ensure you are there on time/ someone is therein your place to collect your child as they can become upset if they don’t see someone

We look forward to working with you all this year. Please don’t hesitate to come to us if you have any concerns.

Many thanks,

Fiona Murray and Sarah Stapleton

Yellow Flag Developments!

The Yellow Flag Committee are organising an Intercultural Week after the June bank holiday. Each class will have to do projects on two countries. There will be different activities on during Intercultural Week. Each day every class will take part in something. We are looking for parents or relatives to help out during this week. If anyone is interested please contact the school; help is very much appreciated. The next step for the Yellow Flag is for the classes to think of a slogan or rap to represent the diversity in our school.

Maths in Junior Infants - Term 2

We have been learning loads of new Maths this year.  In Junior Infants we try to keep our Maths as fun as active as possible.  We are counting all the time, and we count everything.  We sing loads of number rhymes and songs to help us learn our numbers.

We are always learning new maths games and have lots of interesting and colourful equipment to help us learn new things.

Here we are doing a shape experiment.  We wanted to learn which 3-D objects will roll and with will not roll down the hill.  We found out that the shapes with the curved sides will roll down the hill, but the shapes with the flat sides will not.  We also know that toys with wheels will roll down the hill, because the wheels have curved sides.

JI Maths, rolling

We also invited the parents in to a Presentation about how maths and number are taught in Junior Infants, and how they can help their children to learn at home.  A copy of the presentation can be downloaded by clicking on the picture.

Reading in Junior Infants

We are always learning new words in Junior Infants.  We play word games, we practice our word walls and we read our books every day.  

Here we are going on a word hunt around the classroom with our student teacher Ms Lawless.   

Sometimes we go around the school looking for words.  
Maybe when we go out with our mummies and daddies we could start looking for words around the town. 

Every morning we are in our literacy groups.  We are very lucky to have some mummies in to help us with our reading and writing.  They play games with us, they help us to write in our books, and they read our books with us. It makes our groups so much fun to have parents in to help us. 

Here are some pictures of us working in our Literacy groups.  It would be great to have lots more parents in to help us. 

JI Parent's reading, 2015

Maths in Junior Infants

Since starting school in September, Junior Infants have been working very hard in Maths!

We do lots of fun activities, sometimes we don't even know we're learning we're having so much fun!

In Maths this term we have been learning about:

-sorting

-matching

-shapes

-numbers 1,2, 3

-number rhymes

-patterns

That's a lot of work for our first few months in school!

To show our mums and dads, grannies, granddads and everyone else all our hard work we've made a video to show some of the activities we do during Maths every day.

Let's get the Yellow Flag for Ravenswell!

We are delighted to announce that Ravenswell is one of 15 schools in Ireland taking part in the Yellow Flag Programme 2014-2015.

 

What is the Yellow Flag Programme?

The Yellow Flag is a year long programme that celebrates diversity and different cultures.

Over the year we will be working through the 8 Steps of the programme to further develop our welcoming and diverse school. 

 

The 8 Steps of the programme are:

 

 

1. Intercultural and Anti-Racism Training for Staff and Management
   2. Going beyond the School’s Walls: Engaging with the Community
   3. Establishing a Diversity Committee
   4. Conducting an Intercultural Review
   5. Formulating an Action Plan for a Diverse School
   6. Monitoring and Evaluation and Information Dissemination-
   7. Curriculum work-
   8. Production of a Diversity Code and Anti Racist Policy for the school

We are currently on Step 4-The Intercultural Review. Children from 2nd-6th as well as every parent in the school received a questionnaire- thank you for completing these! :)

Keep an eye on the class blogs as well as the Yellow Flag Noticeboard (outside Room 5) for the results of the questionnaires. These will help us in our next step- creating an action plan for a diverse school.

It is sure to be an exciting year as we work towards achieving our Yellow Flag- there will fun events and opportunities for parents to get involved as we celebrate our multicultural school.

 

 

 

Houses and Homes in Junior Infants

It has been another busy month in Junior Infants!

We were delighted to come back to school after the Christmas holidays and we got straight back to work!

In January we have been learning all about houses and homes.

We read stories like 'A Squash and a Squeeze' and 'The Three Little Pigs'.

 

We are getting very good at sequencing, and we were able to sequence the story of 'The Three Little Pigs'.

 

 

In Art we painted beautiful pictures of our houses and we decorated the houses of the three pigs. In Music we learned new songs like 'Gotta Build a House'.

 

Our play time was all about houses and homes too! In Ms Murray's class our role play area was transformed from the jungle  in to an Estate Agent's office. Teacher went to a real estate agent's office in Bray and got lots of magazines and pictures of houses for us. We took turns pretending to be the customer looking to buy a house, and being the estate agent helping the customers.

 

We did a lot of construction play this month. We had a sand box that we pretended was a construction site with tools and trucks. We had to wear hard hats! We used Lego, Stikle Brick, blocks and Mobilo to plan and build our houses.

 

A big thank you to everyone for a FANTASTIC 'Art at Home Project' this month! The theme was 'Box Town' and look at the amazing houses and buildings that the children made at home. Well done everyone!

 

Thank you also to the parents for attending our Parent Workshops this month, which were based on 'Play'. We wanted to show the parents all the work we do in Junior Infants, even if the children think they've just been 'playing all day'!

 

  Have a look at our video to see what we have been up to this month!

 

Junior Infants Writing Workshop for Parents

Last week we had out last Junior Infant Workshop for Parents.

 This workshop was all about writing with your children.  We focused on two aspects of writing: writing for expression and handwriting.

As with all our workshops we started with a presentation from the class teacher and Mary Collins.  This focused on the importance of writing and gave some strategies for developing the children's writing skills at home. 
We then invited the children back in and all the parents did some writing activities with their children. 
It was an excellent workshop and once again the attendance and the participation of parents was wonderful.  As it was our last workshop, we would like to thank the parents for their great contributions during the year, and their willingness to participate.
As we hope to continue the workshops we welcome any feedback from the parents who participated and would love to hear any ideas you might have to improve the programme next year.

Have a look at some of the photos we took during our workshops:

Sports Day 2013

What a fantastic day we had on Sports Day this year.  It was a beautiful sunny day and the whole

school went over to the Bray Emmets GAA club .  There was a wonderful timetable of events organised for the Junior classes and the Senior Classes.

We had sack races, water races, a funny hat relay, a fantastic obstacle course and we played bean-bag golf.

Thanks a million to Mary Collins and Ms Byrnes for organising the day, and to all the teachers and parents who helped us with all our activities.  We had a brilliant time.

Here are some of our photos from the day.

Parents Helping in the Classroom

This has been a very busy year for parents, as we encourage our parents to be very involved in their children's school life.  Part of this is all the wonderful work they do at home during homework games and art activities.
Another important part of this is coming into the school to attend meetings, participate in school workshops and to help in the classroom.

Parent Workshops:
This year Junior Infants has held monthly workshops for parents on various parts of school life.  These workshops have included:

• An Introduction to Junior Infants
• Bedtime Reading with your Child
• Jolly Phonics
• Numeracy Games and Activities

The parents have been wonderful for attending and being active participants in these meetings.  Every meetings consists of a talk from the teacher, and demonstration by the pupils of what they have learned and then the parents play a game with their own child.

Parents Helping in the Classroom:
A number of Junior Infant parents have volounteered their time to help our with activies in the school and in the classroom.  There are parents helping with the Bedtime Reading Club on Tuesday mornings and the Savings Club on Friday Mornings.
We also have a number of parents helping in the classrooms during the Morning Maths Games and Art Activities.  These parents are being very generous with their time, and their help is an invaluable support to the class teacher.  More importantly, their children love to see Mummy coming in to help and to be a "teacher". 

Thank you so much to all our parent helpers.  We appreciate everything you do.

Parents are Working Hard at Home

The parents in Junior Infants have been working very hard this year.

Homework Games
They have been playing lots of homework games with their children.  We have been playing number games, sound games and word bingo.  Because of all their hard work, lots of children are moving up to their second and third word lists. 

Art at Home Projects:
Every month the children are given an art project to take home.  Parents and other family memers are encouraged to take part in the project and to help out the child as much as he or she needs.  Previous projects included

• My Family Tree
• My Time Line - I am growing up.
• Paper Roll Jungle Animals

In January we were learning about homes.  Every child was asked to make a box house using old boxes and art materials.  Some really wonderful houses were brought into school.  Lots of different shapes, sizes and colours and using lots of different materials.  A special thanks to the parents and families for helping with this project and making our Box Town look so wonderful.