P1 - 2015/2016
May
A Reporter from News2Day came into our classroom to ask the children all about school and to see whether they gave it the thumbs up or the thumbs down. The vote was unanimous and the school was the clear winner!
The broadcast was part of a bigger report being done on UNICEF and their new initiative called Emergency Lessons which looks at education around the world.
For more photographs please click here.
Congratulations to all the P1s on their magnificent Australian Projects. Such effort was put in by each and every one of you in the written projects but also in your oral presentations for the exhibition. Thank you to the other classes who visited the P1 classes throughout the day and also thanks to the parents for the hard work put in at home.
For photos please click here.
We also reached our inner villains, inspired by Roald Dahl, creating the most gruesome, disgusting, mean characters we could imagine! We had lots of fun creating a shared story which we later illustrated. Take a look at some of the characters we invented by clicking here.
April
A visit from Australia!
We were super lucky to get a visitor to our classroom who had come all the way from Australia. Ben, Georgia’s cousin lives in Perth and is here in Ireland on a holiday. He taught us all about the Australian animals, what school was like in Australia, told us stories about life in Australia and answered all our questions we had for our upcoming projects. We even sent Ben off home with a 'cupla focal' as well!
Secret Speaker in P1
April's secret speaker was Kirsten, Ben’s mum. Kirsten taught us about her work as a fashion designer and allowed us to see where different designers got their inspiration. We were even lucky enough to get a peek into Kirsten’s own fashion portfolio. We soon realised that we had some budding designers in P1 with the t-shirts we designed.
March
Enjoying the commemoration of the 1916 Rising.
Secret Speaker
This month's secret speaker was Sinead, Sophie's mum. She taught us all about the work she does as an accountant with Grant Thornton. We learned that she works with big sums and has lots of meetings and her main job is to make sure big companies make a profit. We even did our own income and expenditure log. The best part was the goodie bag we each received from Grant Thornton!
Visit to Google
P1 and K2 took an amazing trip to the Google Headquarters here in Dublin. We were greeted by Tailgater at the door as well as by lots of friendly faces who were going to entertain us for the morning and show us around. We then went into the Foundry where we sang and danced like popstars on stage with mics and cameras. We took a tour around the building, seeing things like the Self-Driving Car and the device used for creating Google Earth. On Cloud 9 we put on our thinking caps to see what we could design for the future Google. We even took 'showers' here as we learned it's in the shower we come up with our best ideas! We entered Ocean 11 and it was there that we enjoyed a light snack and listened to Ronan Harris, Theo and Cara's dad, and Head of Google Ireland tell us a little more about Google and what it does. We left energised and excited about the life that is Google.
February
On Pancake Tuesday P1 practised their skills at flipping and tasting pancakes The smell coming from the classroom was delicious!!
We have been busy in P1 learning about Chinese traditions and Chinese New Year. We made traditional lanterns to decorate the hallways and we're lucky enough to have special guest Ms Du teach us some Chinese phrases and how to make paper animals! It was lots of fun!
January
DID SOMEONE MENTION COCKTAILS???
P1 have been busy making yummy cocktails as they learn all about capacity and measuring liquids with litres and millilitres. Even some of the teachers enjoyed tasting what we had made!
The Stars are Coming Out for Christmas!
Well done to all our P1 stars of Christmas who did an amazing job at their play on Friday. You all deserve the prize, the award Outstanding Contribution to Christmas!
Secret Speaker – December
P1's secret speaker this month was Patrick's dad, Sean who is a US Air Force pilot. We learned so much about the work he does and the training needed to become one of these pilots. We even got to try on his cool helmet!
November
Ben’s dad Max was our November Secret Speaker. Max told us all about his job as a ‘type designer’. We learned that all the letters we see in magazines, in books, on signposts, and the fonts we use when we type on the computer are designed by a type designer like Max.
Take a look at the type fonts we designed ourselves.
In November P1 had a workshop from GOAL following our GOAL Jersey Day! We learned all about homes around the world and how different homes are made. We also learned about the countries that GOAL works in.
During our Green Aware Day, the P1 children were finding out what energy is need to power different amounts of energy. The guys from Energia put us to the challenge to see how hard we could peddle, in turn creating enough energy to power household items. Some of us were even able to power a TV! We learned that the most important thing is to turn things off when we are not using them to save electricity!
Churn butter churn! Churn butter churn!
As we are looking at animals and the farm this month, we decided to try our hand at making butter as they did in the past. We put on our scientist hats and noticed how the cream began as a liquid and then became solid when it turned into butter. The best part however, was getting to taste the butter on a cracker at the end. Yum!
On 10 November Hindus all over the world celebrated Diwali – the festival of light. We learned about the story of Rama and Sita and the traditions that Hindus have for this festival. Thank you Naina for showing us your traditional dress for this festival and teaching us about it.
In October had a visit from Windyridge Garden Centre. We learned all about habitats and the 4 essential things needed to create a habitat – shelter, food, space and company. We talked about how we could create a habitat with our families in our own gardens using different planting levels. We even got to sow our own daffodils to add to our garden habitats. The children had a great morning!
On Wednesday 7th of October Oscar’s grandpa and Sophie’s nana came into our class to talk about what school was like when they were young. Sophie’s nana went to school in Scotland during WWII and Oscar’s grandpa went to St. Andrew’s College when he was young. We looked at pictures of them at school too. We had great fun comparing school in the past and school in the present.
Here in P1 are learning all about our locality in SESE. We took a walk around our local area to find out what buildings we could see. On the walk the children drew pictures of what they saw in front, behind, to the right and to the left of them. We learned that there was a shop, church, houses, two schools, a car park and a pharmacy in our local area.
