Welcome to a new school year!

A big welcome to all the new pupils who have just started school in Junior Infants, and a special welcome back to all our pupils in Senior Infants.

It's lovely to see everyone looking so wonderful in their new uniforms, and so excited to be in school.  No doubt we are all going to have a really excellent year.

As always, should you have any questions or concerns during the year please speak with your class teacher and she will be happy to help.  Alternatively you can speak with our Home School Links teacher, Mary Collins, or the school principal, Emer Breen.

Best of luck to everyone at the start of the new year.

Keeping our School Clean and Tidy

Junior Infants have been learning all about how important it is to keep the environment clean and tidy. 
We know that we should put rubbish in the bin and not throw litter on the ground.
We know that we should recycle paper in the recycling bin.
We know that we can help to keep our area tidy by picking up litter when we see it.


We went with 6th class on a litter clean up walk around the school.  We wore our safety jackets and we were on the lookout for litter.  The 6th class girls had gloves on to keep their hands clean and safe, and we carried the litter bags to collect any litter we found.

It was a great walk, and we were delighted that we could not find too much litter as our school is kept very clean by our caretaker James.

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.

Going on a Bear Hunt

Ms McHale's class learned all about Journeys in March. 

We had a post office in our class room and we went on lots of journeys around the school to deliver all out mail.  When we came back we drew maps to show the journey we took when delivering our mail.

We also read books about journeys.  Our favourite book was "We're Going on a Bear Hunt".  We acted out the story and did lots of art work for our bear hunt display.  We also drew our own bear hunt maps to show how well we remembered the book.

When we were finished the story we went on our own Bear Hunt in the school garden.  Ms McHale hid lots of coloured bears around the garden.  Each team had a map with pictures of objects in the garden on it.  We had to find the object in the garden and then colour in the bears on our map.  It was a great day.

Under the Sea

In Junior Infants we are learning all about the sea and life under the sea.  Here are some of the videos and resources we will be using this month.

• Short cartoon of a submarine going under the sea
• Underwater dream - Sound Effects
• Sounds of the Sea
• Paper Plate Crafts
• Under the Sea Crafts

Phonics Games to Play at Home

Choose some of these phonics games to play at home:

• PBS Kids - Alphabet Games
• CVC Machine
• Initial Sound Matching Castle
• Phoneme Pop
• Sesame Street - Jumping Rhymes
• Starfall - Learn to read (games and stories)
• Jim's Whirlyword Machine