Junior Dina school

Meet Wally. Wally visits our class every Tuesday as part of the Junior Dina School Programme. Currently, in our school, all the Senior Infant classes are participating.Sometimes Dina (the Principal of Dina School!!!) also comes along to visit us. She helps to encourage us to try our best at all times and teaches us about some very important school and classroom rules. Sometimes Wally has a problem and we have to help him to solve it. We are learning so much and we love Dina School.We also use the Green Patrol. The Green Patrol is a great incentive for us to try our best. Each day, everyone starts out in the green, and if we try our best and are very good,we remain in the green and we then get a tick at the end of each day. When we get ten ticks we can pick a treasure from teacher's treasure box.We are always so excited when we get to pick our treasure. Then we begin all over again We have earned so many treasures thus far and teacher says that we are simply AMAZING!!. Last week Wally brought us some sweets, as a treat for being so good, and as a gift for Christmas. Thank you SO much Wally!! In Last week's lesson we learned all about concentrating. We know that it is very important to concentrate in school and teacher explained that good concentrating involves LISTENING FOR INSTRUCTIONS AND HAVING YOUR EYES ON YOUR WORK OR ON TEACHER. We also helped Wally to concentrate, as he was finding it difficult to do so initially, but now he is much better at it. Merry Christmas Wally and Dina and see you after Christmas!

Old and new toys

Santa's toy sacks got mixed up.

We sorted the toys again for him into old and new toys.

We loved helping Santa.
Here's how we got on.

Green school committee

Frankie from our class is on our green school committee.

Here is what he said in his interview about the meeting today:

Using chopsticks

We have learned all about China.

Today we tried using chopsticks.

We found this really hard, but most of us managed to pick up marshmallows with our chopsticks.

Forces and types of energy

 We learned all about forces today.

We could tell which forces were pushes, pulls or twists.

 We were also really good at sorting types of energy into light energy, heat energy, sound energy and movement energy.

Learning about Poland

In our class we have 5 children whose parents are from Poland.

Today Magda came to our class to tell us all about Poland.

We saw the Polish flag (white and red) and pictures of the dance costumes they wear in Poland.

These clothes look really special.

Bigos

Snitzel

We saw pictures of delicious Polish food which the children assure us are really really tasty.

We also loved hearing about Christmas in Poland with the 12 dishes of food and 2 Santa visits!

We would all like to move to Poland!

Pierogi

Magda told us a great story of a Polish dragon.

We were fascinated by all the details in the story.

Here is a picture of a statue in Poland of that exact dragon.

We also learned how to say Hello, Goodbye, Happy Christmas and Thank you in Polish.

We even got to taste some Polish cookies made by some expert Polish bakers!

Thank you so much Magda for telling us all about Poland!

Saving energy with Guzzler

 We were talking today about how we can save energy.

Teacher had a great book about Guzzler and it gave us lots of energy saving tips like:

• switching off lights when we are not in the room
• walking, cycling or running to school
• putting on extra clothes when we are cold
• not letting the tap run when we brush our teeth
• switching off electric things when we are not using them or when we leave the room.
• opening the curtains in the morning rather than switching on the light

Can you think of other ways to save energy?

We enjoyed having a think about which things at home use batteries and which use mains electricity.

We are going to try our best to save energy at home and at school.

Find out more about Guzzler here

Learning about Portugal

We were delighted today to have a visit from Ricardo whose son is in our class.

Ricardo is from Portugal and he told us lots of interesting things about Portugal.

He showed us some really interesting slides about what Portugal looks like, where it is, how they say Hello, Goodbye and Happy Christmas in Portuguese and how Christmas is celebrated in Portugal.

We even got to see the flag and to taste some Portuguese sweets. Yummy!

 Thanks so much to Ricardo for visiting us today.  We learned lots of things about Portugal today and hopefully we will get to visit it some day.

Rain and rainmakers

We listened to a great piece that was made by people and sounded like rain.

It sounded exactly like rain.

You can listen to it here:

 We made our own rain sounds in class:

Next we had a look at rainmakers which sound like rain and people believe will help bring rain to places where rain is badly needed.

We made our own rainmakers out of bottles of seeds, rice, pasta and water.

We listened to the sounds each made and we found that

rice or seeds in a bottle make great rain sounds, but pasta or water do not.

We are lucky in Ireland that we have plenty of water for our crops, for swimming in, for drinking and for washing.  People in some other countries are not so lucky.

The Water cycle

We are learning about the water cycle.

We loved hearing the story of the raindrop and then sequencing the pictures from the story.
Remember to check out our earlier post on the Water Cycle:

Acids and caring for our teeth

We all like having lovely clean shiny teeth.

We were talking today about how acids can be bad for your teeth. 

But....how can we tell which things are acids or not.

Teacher had some cabbage with her today.  It looks purple but it is called red cabbage.

When you put this in hot water the water turns blue.  It is a pH indicator.

Now all we had to do was add things to find out whether they are acids or not.

We found that lemon, vinegar, orange juice and Sprite are all acids and turn the cabbage water pink.

Bread soda is not (it is an alkali or base) and turns the cabbage water light blue.

Now we know which drinks are acids and we will wash our teeth well after drinking acids in foods.

Here's a great song about brushing your teeth: