Here we are!

You are all very welcome to our classroom page on Scoil Mhuire Machaire Áirne's school website. We are a great classroom, always looking after each other and being so very kind and always working hard which our teacher loves! We LOVE learning and meeting our friends every day in Scoil Mhuire and we hope we can share some of our work with you here, although, we are so busy this is just a taster!

Pancake Tuesday

Our classroom assistant, Noleen, kindly made us some pancakes.
​ A perfect snack break!

Science - Our Senses

In science we have been learning about the senses. We have five senses in total, hearing, sight, taste, smell and the sense of touch. All our senses are connected to our nervous system. This is the motor way that allows messages to be sent to our brain. We learned that our ear has three parts the outter ear, the middle ear and the inner ear.  Our ear drum is in our middle ear. We learned that sound travels in soundwaves. The waves travel down the ear canal and make the ear drum vibrate. This then makes three little bones, the hammer, the anvil and the stirrup move and they then move the liquid in the cochlea . This movement is picked up by the nervous system and a message is sent to the brain which understands the sound. We did an experiment to see if sound really travels in waves. We made a model of an ear drum. On the stretched balloon we put some grains of rice. Then we made some noise!!!!!!!! Can you see what happens to the grains of rice. Look closely.

Ár bpeataí

Bhíomar ag caint faoin bpeataí atá againn.  Rinneamar comhrá faoi cuairt a thabhairt ar siopa na bpeataí.

Nollaig Shona Daoibh!

Christmas Art

This month we focused on seasonal art for Christmas.
We made Christmas cards for our families and wrote some very important messages inside.
We also made pompom snow angels to hang on our Christmas tree. 

Letters to Santa 

In English we have been learning how to write a letter. The layout of a letter is not like a story. In the top right-hand corner you must write your address and under this you must write the date. You must skip a line between the address and the date. Then you move to the left hand margin and write a greeting to the person you are writing to. Letters often start with the greeting, 'Dear............'.  Your first paragraph starts on the next line but just under where your greeting ended then its back to your normal left hand margin. It is very different to our normal writing but it is very important to know how to write a letter, especially at this time of year.

This year we decided that along with leaving out some treats for Santie on Christmas Eve we would write him a thank you letter and let him know that we are very grateful for the lovely things we have in our lives. Here are some examples. We hope that Santie likes getting our letters as he only usually gets letters asking for things. Thank you Santie for always giving us a great Christmas!

Christmas Concert 2019

This year we had our Christmas concert in the community hall in Smithborough. It was a great night. Our class did a play called, 'Seven Little Penguins'. We can't wait to see the DVD to see ourselves perform but we really enjoyed watching all the other classes, they were super!

Rehearsal Day in the Hall

A Christmas Treat

We were so lucky on the day of our Christmas holidays as we were spolied with treats. Our Parents' Association gave us all a selection box but little did we know we had a budding chef in our classroom with us every day! Look at the yummy Christmas buns he made for us. Go raibh míle maith agaibh, gach duine!

Ceardlann Daidí na Nollag

Seo pictiúr atá ar ár bhfuinneog in ár seomra ranga. Scríobh Rang a hAon agus Rang a Dó píosa beag le chéile le cuidiú ár múinteoir. Is breá linn ag cumadh scéal nuair a bhíonn sé ar an múinteoir an scéal a scríobh síos!!!!

Ceardlann San Nicolás
Tá gach síofra ag obair sa cheardlann. Tá síofra amháin ag cur bronntanais faoin gcrann Nollag. Tá síofraí eile ag cur maisiúcháin ar an gcrann Nollag. Tá síofra ag obair ar an ríomhaire ag scríobh liosta faoi na buachaillí agus na cailíní maithe. Tá Daidí na Nollag ag léamh an liosta. Tá Daidí na Nollag sásta leis an liosta. Tá bréagáin agus bronntanais aige do na páistí maithe. Tá súil agam go bhfuil m'ainm ar an liosta!

Skipping Workshop

We were very lucky that our school and Magherarney Development Association organised a skipping workshop for us. Each classroom had their own workshop with skipping coach Mark and then we had a skipping exhibition at the end of the day where the different classes showed off the new skipping skills they had learned. It was great fun and we had no idea there were so many different ways to skip. 

Some clips of our skipping efforts in Rang 1 & 2

Geography and Mapping Skills

We started our mapping skills this year by exploring the globe in our classroom. The earth is a sphere with an imaginary line around its middle called the equator. Half a sphere is called a hemisphere and so with the equator there is a northern hemisphere and a southern hemisphere. We learned there is much more water than land on our planet. The earth has seven continents and we made a little book about them. Ireland is on the continent called Europe. We are in the Northern hemisphere. 

Then we looked at mapping the area around our school. Our school is in Magherarney which is just off the N54. Our school is on a third class road, the L2150. The old Magherarney school which is now a boxing club and which is opposite Saint Mary's church is not actually in Magherarney. It is in the townland of Templetate. There is lots of fresh water around us like in the nearby river Finn and in three local lakes called Lough Oony, Billary Lake and Magherarny lake. There are lots of different types of houses around our school including bungalows, dormer bungalows, semi detached houses, detached houses and terraced houses. We looked at the different types of roads that can be on a map and we also saw in history that before the good roads we have now in Smithborough we had other forms of transport including a railway and a canal! Our place is a very special one!

Smithborough Railway Station

Templtate Loch-Keepers Cottage

Science 

In Science we have been learning a lot about seasonal changes in our environment. For Science week we went to Clones Court House for a workshop on 'Pollution in our Environment'. We learned in particular how dangerous plastic can be when thrown away. We went with our friends from rang a trí, ceathair, cúig agus sé. You can see from our photos how good our listening skills were and we were lucky to get the front seats! It was very interesting.

We also looked at our own school environment and thought about how we could improve it. We had been learning about deciduous trees in Autumn and seed dispersal like with the helicopters on the Sycamore and the conkers on the Horse chestnut tree or acorns on the Oak tree. The wind and animals and water help with seed dispersal. Then teacher taught us about bulbs which are different to seeds. Bulbs look a bit like onions. Most grow in Spring. Bulbs are dormant (sleep) for most of the year, but when the soil temperature is right for them they begin to grow under the ground. Roots grow first, reaching down into the soil and then a green shoot starts to poke through the top of the bulb. It gets bigger and bigger and leaves start to show. A flower stem grows. The bud at the end of the stem is closed tight. As the weather gets warmer, the bud opens and the flower can be seen. Daffodils and tulips are two kinds of bulb that flower in Spring. Here we are tidying out some of the school's planters and putting in some bulbs and other plants. We hope to have daffodils and tulips in the Spring.

Magherarney Development association got a new bird table for the car park along with lots of trees. Rang 5 & 6 planted the trees and we are going to keep the bird table topped up with food for the birds during winter. So far they are eating it all in one day! 

The Important Book

We read 'The Important Book' by Margaret Wise Browne. It is very cleverly written. We decided to brain-storm some possible topics that we could write our own important messages about. Here are some examples. 

Oíche Shamhna

In art we explored print. We began by sponge painting our background in orange. We then took our choice of spooky template and using a roller covered the template in black paint. Next we placed the template upside down on our orange background, covered it with a plastic place mat and with a clean print roller, rolled over the placemat. When we removed the template sandwiched between our background sheet and plastic placemat, the image had been printed on the background sheet. 

We all enjoyed dressing up for our Halloween party which was to raise money for Temple Street Hospital. There were some super, cool homemade costumes this year and it was great fun seeing everyone arrive that morning at school. What a delightfully spooky playground it was!

History - Halloween Traditions 

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Here is the little book we read on Halloween traditions that teacher made for us. We had never heard of the fairies moving house at Halloween so people long ago left out food for them. We also did not realise that snap-apple was once such a dangerous game!

English Novel-The Twits

Our teacher has been reading us the novel, 'The Twits', by Roald Dahl. It is a very funny book but the main characters are very mean to each other! Here are some of our thoughts about the characters. They are not kind to each other like we are in this classroom!

Maths and Fine Motor Skills

In Maths we have been learning about 2D shape. The D in 2D stands for the word dimensional. In a 2D shape there are two things or dimensions to measure, its length and width. We have been working on naming lots of 2D shapes we even learned a little bit about angles! An angle is made where two straight lines meet. There are names on the angles depending on their size, acute, obtuse and the special right angle which measures 90 degrees. We have also been using our fine motor skills to make our 2D shapes into pictures. We have a template to help us but then we must try and construct the picture again without the template, it is a great test of our memories!

Art and the element of Line 

We looked at a number of different examples of artists work where many different types of line could be seen. It was amazing the different feeling and atmosphere the different types of line gave to the picture. We learned lines can be straight or curved. They can appear as horizontal or vertical lines or sometimes diagonal lines. We also looked at paintings and prints where the lines were in a zig-zag pattern or appeared as soft, wavy lines or even in spiral patterns.

We have also been learning about the element of colour too. There are three primary colours, red, blue and yellow and they can not be made by using any other colours. The secondary colours of green, orange and purple can be made by mixing the primary colours.  Red and yellow gives an orange colour. Blue and yellow mixed together gives us green and red and blue gives a purplish colour.  We used our primary colours and our knowledge of lines in our balloons. We had to try and create as many different sections as we could using line in different ways.

We have been learning a lot about the element of line in art. In our maths work we learned about horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines. In our Science we have been studying leaves and we noticed a lot of line patterns in the leaves. We used a template of different leaf shapes and instead of colouring them in we used line to fill them in. We learned how to overlap the leaf template. Using line to fill the leaves in rather than a block of colour made the leaves look like they were see-through. The word in science for this is transparent. 

Helping Hands in our classroom 

We have been talking about what kind of classroom we would like this year. We talked about the different things we would like it to be and we learned that the word inclusive means no one is left out. We understand that we must all work together to make our classroom how we want it and so we all designed our own helping hand which we promise to use to make our classroom a happy place.