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:

http://www.askaboutireland.ie/learning-zone/primary-students/infants/english/the-children-of-lir/ 

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. 

Infant timezone!

So for two weeks in January I was in a classroom 'timezone'. Taking on the idea of developing their sense of time and the language of time was a much wider topic than I had originally thought!
Here are some activities Senior Infants got up to during that...time... (excuse the pun!).

1) We sang some songs I nabbed off youtube to teach the sequence and names of the days of the week and months of the year... only problem with these is that they are so catchy I found myself singing them to myself for the whole fortnight!
Days of the week:

Months of the Year:

 So we played games with these songs like lining up the months/days and telling me which month/day is missing. 

          

2) We made a class outline of what we do on each day of the week to refer to each morning and also to end the questions of 'when are we doing art??' etc. I got their ideas at the end of each day of what we should include and drew pictures beside each to aid comprehension of the chart. 

                                 

3) Rhymes: Hickory Dickory Dock: 

                                 

 Image does not belong to me. It is used for educational purposes:http://www.nursery-rhymes.org/images/rhymes_images/hickory-dickory-dock.jpg

We said the rhyme and talked about parts that rhymed and parts that didn't. We then composed a version as a class so that the whole rhyme... rhymed! 

Our rhyme:                                                       

                                           Hickory Dickory Dock,

                  The mouse ran up the clock,

                  The clock struck one,

                  The mouse was done, 

                  The clock struck two,

                  The mouse bit you,

                  The clock struck three, 

                  The mouse ran up a tree.

4) We made clocks! And they looked so good we turned them into a class mobile when we had finished the unit on time, by sticking them along a piece of string and hanging them from the ceiling. We made them from paper plates. I had stuck on address labels onto where the numbers would be to give them some guidance as to where they should write the numbers. I added hands to the clocks and they used them to tell me various times throughout our maths lessons. They loved decorating them to look really colourful!

5) We played 'What Time Is It Mr Wolf?' in PE. See here for details of how to play the game: http://www.littlesteps.eu/?/getting-active/running/What-time-is-it-Mr-Wolf/

6) Read the story: My Great Grandpa for history. Got this book from Amazon for an amazing price and it was worth every cent because the kids loved it! We talked about young people and old people and the concept of generations. We used our bodies to show the difference between old and young and where we might place people on the family tree (at the top: standing on our toes, in the middle or crouching low down for babies.) We made family trees of the characters in the story, placing the older characters we drew at the top and the younger ones we drew at the bottom. 

                        

Image does not belong to me. It is used for educational purposes: http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51SXAZFJ9NL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

7) Listened and responded to the 'Syncopated Clock' piece of music.

8) Learned about Ta and ti-ti (the timing of crotchets and quavers) in music, by telling them the story of Ta the deaf cat and her baby kittens (ti and ti). 

9) We also started timing ourselves in terms of how long it would take us to get ready to go home every afternoon. I would put a line on the time we started with a whiteboard marker and then we would count the minutes that had passed when we had finished. This helped us get out quicker and also informally instilled in them the length of a minute or 5 minutes verses the length of an hour which we also timed one day.

                            

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Somewhere to organise all those ideas floating around in my head...

That's pretty much why I have started this blog. That and the fact that I am a big fan of teacher blogs and have got some brilliant ideas from these in the past. I also find a surprising lack of blogs based on the Irish primary  school system so here's my contribution! While I, like any other teacher, have found lessons to be both successful and a total disaster, I will post some of my own tried and tested lessons for the benefit of anyone stuck in a planning rut! Hopefully I will also become a more organised person along the way!