We have 18 children in the Junior and Senior infant classroom . The infant classroom has had a very busy start to the new school year. Here are some of the things we have being learning:

English

Sounds

Junior Infants have started learning their sounds using the Jolly phonics programme.

We have done lots of activities to help us practice our sounds.

• We use our sound books to say our new sounds are revise sounds we have already learned.
• We sing the Jolly Phonics songs with the special action for each sound.
• We have started blending some sounds together to read CVC words such as cat , hot , sit etc
• We play games with our sounds and look for pictures and words that start with our sounds.  We can make sets of pictures that start with the same sound.
• We look for our sounds all around the classroom.  In our books, in the library, on posters, on the whiteboard and when the teacher is writing.

Writing

• Junior Infants have also started learning how to form their letters. It is vital that your child learns from the start to hold his/her pencil correctly ( see you tube video – Pencil Grasp (Learn to pick up a pencil). An incorrectly formed grip is very difficult to change, so it is very important your child learns to hold the pencil correctly from the start.

Senior Infants ( sounds and writing)

• Senior Infants are revising their letter sounds from the Junior Infant curriculum and have started writing capital letters. Senior infants are also working hard on their Tricky Word list. These are words that we cannot sound out so we have to learn them by heart. However we know that looking at the first and last letter will help us reading the tricky words!

Reading

Both classes have read their first class reader and are looking forward to reading more about Max, Kitty and Finn in their next reader.

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Gaeilge

In Gaeilge we have learned about Mé Féin ( myself) , An Scoil ( school)  and Oíche Shamhna ( Halloween).  The children know the Irish for most colours now and we practice these every day. The children practice comhrá with a partner and sometimes our friend “Teidí” even drops in for a comhrá with the class.

We love our fun new interactive programme on our class whiteboard.

SESE

Before the Mid Term break, we are talking a lot about Autumn and we went on an Autumn walk looking for signs of Autumn. The children found horse chestnuts, pine cones, golden crunchy leaves and apples. While we were on our Autumn walk we also looked out for shapes and realized we have squares, rectangles, circles and triangles in our school yard!