Fourth Class Christmas Update

Nollaig Shona daoibh go léir! What a busy term this has been!

In English, we have been working on our Persuasive Writing. We wrote about our favourite hobbies, and used persuasive language to express why we believed it was the best sport. As we began to get into festive mode, the children wrote a film review on a Christmas film of their choice. They thoroughly enjoyed creating advertisements for these films afterwards, and children were then given the opportunity to share their work with their peers. We had great fun practicing persuasive language to argue which movie we thought was best!

In Maths, we came up with our very own gift guide for children of various ages, using Smyths toy catalogues. We had a budget to stay within per child, and used our Maths skills to investigate what we could get for the best value. The aim was to compile the most exciting list of toys for that person, while staying within budget! The boys and girls have finished learning and revising all their multiplication tables from 0 up to x12. All the hard work paid off and we did brilliantly in our tables test. We enjoyed putting our brains to work this term, exploring tricky topics such as long multiplication and problem solving! Ms. Wixted is very proud of us.

For Gaeilge, we have put in a tremendous effort learning the 11 irregular verbs in the Aimsir Chaite. We are a lot more confident using this tense and we certainly have expanded our vocabulary. It is wonderful to see our ‘teanga ó bhéal’ blossom as we can now form sentences more easily, independently. This was evident when we wrote our ‘Nuacht’ together,and the children had amazing ideas for sentences we could say as Gaeilge as part of the news. We have been busy exploring the themes of ‘Bia’ and ‘An Nollaig’ this term, listening to the excellent stories in Bua na Cainte and playing the interactive whiteboard games.

We celebrated Science Week this term. We began our week by investigating how water is transported through plants. We added food dye to various containers, and then added our white flowers. We were amazed when we came to school the next day to discover our flowers had changed colour! We chose a scientist of our choice to research and used the school laptops to learn various facts about them. On Friday we carried out some very cool experiments which included erupting volcanoes, skittle rainbows, exploding watermelons and lava lamps. The boys and girls worked in groups to present their experiments to the class. It was messy but we learned a lot about chemical reactions.

We love Art in 4th Class. This term, we created Japanese inspired paintings, melting snowman and carol singers (or people eating snowflakes, which is how some of the children interpreted it). The Amber Flag committee organised to send Christmas Cards to Croagh nursing home this year. The children were so enthusiastic that some of them wanted to make extra cards to send. The cards turned out very beautiful indeed and the pupils were chuffed to send them off!

4th class pupils worked very hard practicing their song singing for the annual School Christmas Concert. They performed a selection of Peace Proms and Christmas Carols for the matinée and evening show. It was a huge success and they all sounded amazing! Well done everyone!

We were delighted to be invited to the Salesians show ‘Back to the 80’s’ and we had a great time in L.I.T. We were also very excited to go and see ‘Aladdin’ in U.L. before our Christmas holidays. It was another great day out!

We would like to give a special word ofthanks to our wonderful SNA’s Sharon and Catherine who are in our classroom each morning and afternoon. They are super helpful and so kind to us and we are lucky to have them. Also, we are delighted to have Ms. Quinn and Mr. Sparling helping us with our learning and we would like to thank them for all the work that she does supporting us with our learning this term.

Have a wonderful, safe Christmas and we look forward to welcoming all of the children back to school in the New Year!

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