Tuesday, 28 February 2012

Spring Has Sprung!

My latest adventures with Senior Infants have been based on the theme of spring.
We started off with acknowledging the signs of spring by looking out the window and then at a spring picture which things kept disappearing from! They had to tell me what sign of spring (daffodils, cherry blossoms, lambs, nests, frog spawn etc.) had gone missing each time.
We also acknowledged our new desktop wallpaper which I feel is an excellent daily reminder of the season!
Image does not belong to me. It is used for educational purposes. 
1) History: 
We read the story of the Ugly Duckling talking about how he felt, how we could help him if we were there at the time and how we should treat people who are different. We then drew a picture of an event from the beginning, middle and end of the story. We cut the pictures out and gave them to our partners to sequence and stick onto some nice blue paper. 

Image does not belong to me. It is used for educational purposes. 

2) English: Instructional writing: 
Following the theme of the ugly duckling we created our own four step ducklings from playdough. (Roll a small ball for the head, a big one for the body and make a tail, stick on googly eyes, stick on a beak.) After they had been made we drew a picture of each stage of the process in four boxes and wrote a sentence about each stage under each picture. We then took a picture of the finished product to stick onto our instructions at the end.
Next week we will be planting seeds and they will undertake a similar task following this activity!

( Edit: See our sown onions!
)


3) Science and Geography: 
We focused on animals and their young. We read the story ' Baa! Moo! What Will We Do?' about some farm animals who lost their babies.                                       
                                                                   Image does not belong to me. It is used for educational purposes. 
We helped the mother animals find the baby animal pictures that I had placed/hidden around the room. They named the baby animals when they spotted them and called out to them using the poem we are learning: Come My Chicks:
Come my chicks,
It's time for bed,
that's what mother hen said,
But first I'll count you just to see,
If you have all come back to me,
Chick 1, chick 2, chick 3, Oh dear!
Chick 4, chick 5, yes you're all here!
We replaced the words 'chicks' and 'hen' with whatever animal we were calling out for at the time. E.g piglets, pig, foal, horse, lamb, sheep, calf, cow, gosling, goose.

We also discussed differences and similarities between the mothers and their young as we found the baby animals.

Image does not belong to me. It is used for educational purposes. 
We also focused on the frog life cycle and played this fun game to learn and discuss the stages of a frog's life: http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/scienceforkids/life_cycle/frog_lifecycle.htm
We then drew the stages ourselves and labelled them after. 

4) Art: 
We painted spring flowers focusing on different flowers we could make with different brush sizes: We dabbed big fluffy paintbrushes on the page to paint fluffy yellow flowers, red thin brushes to paint thin petals and thin dots of blue paint to paint bluebell like flowers. Then we painted in all the stems on the flowers and some grass to finish off!

                  













5) Music:
We sang the song 'Over In the Meadow' (From the Right Note Programme: Senior Infants) about all the animals and their young and we made sound effects between each verse to represent the animal we sang about.

Image does not belong to me. It is used for educational purposes. 

6) History (lesson 2): 
We read the Irish Legend of the Children of Lir on this website:
We linked this with drama by acting out important scenes from the story as we read through it e.g. the transformation of the children into swans, their travelling from lake to lake and their changing from swans to old people. We then drew pictures from the story and wrote a sentence to accompany what we had drawn. We sequenced some of the images drawn following this activity. 

Image does not belong to me. It is used for educational purposes. 

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