We’ve been learning all about the planet Earth in space, as well as the history of The Space Race between the Soviet Union and the USA. It has been such an interesting topic to learn about and we have really enjoyed it! We took inspiration from this to create stunning solar system scenes. Imagine you are looking out of a window in your spacecraft… maybe this is what you could see.

We used a printing technique called marbling to create the colours and patterns on our planets and we used splatter painting to create our galaxy backgrounds. We think you’ll agree that they’re mesmerising!

Once all our pieces were created and dried, we combined them to produce beautiful space scenes. Our splatter painting became beautiful stars and our marbling became fantastic planets. We added some sparkle too! You might notice our yellow stars too – these stars display our opinions based on our class walking debate: ‘It was ethical to send Laika the dog to space in order to further advance human space exploration’. This was a very interesting debate to take part in and we all shared some great opinions!

We also researched the only 12 people who have walked on the Moon. Did you know that all 12 people who have walked on the Moon did so between 1969 and 1972? No one has been there since so the footprints of these 12 astronauts are still there, perfectly undisturbed! Here we are completing our research:

Last week, our class led our school assemblies. We chose the theme of God’s Creation to share with the school. On Monday we shared a poem we wrote as a class about the 7 day of the Creation. On Wednesday we shared our favourite or the most striking parts of the Creation in our opinions. On Friday we shared some posters and slogans which we had made all about how we can protect and conserve God’s Creation. Check out our work below:

Our assembly song for the week was ‘My Feet Are On The Rock’ by I Am They. You can listen to it here:

This was our prayer of the week:

In our SESE lessons, we have been learning all about our school. We are so lucky to have a lovely, warm, modern building in Springdale, but it wasn’t always like that! We’ve been learning about the history of our school and have examined some very interesting artefacts including some old roll books (even as far back as the 1870s!), old account ledgers, old school reports (some from the 1970s), and then more recently some newspaper cuttings and photographs from when our new school building was built:

We have also been learning about some of the people in school who do important jobs, some of them we don’t even realise what it is they do all day! Needless to say, we’ve learned that they are VERY busy people. We interviewed our Principal Ms. Cahill, our secretary Ms. Crawte, and our caretaker Mr. Kirk. Here are a few photos of their visits!

Go raibh míle maith agaibh Ms. Cahill, Ms. Crawte agus Mr. Kirk!

We’ve been working hard on our tennis skills over the past number of weeks. Our coordination has really improved and our ability to have a rally over the net is much stronger too! We’re looking forward to our last two tennis sessions with Coach Hugh over the next couple of weeks and we’ll miss it when it’s over!

Last week in Science class, we were given a question to answer. The question was: “How long can you keep a cube of ice from melting?” In our groups, we were given an ice cube each as well as a ‘control’ ice cube, and we were given a selection of materials (or insulators) including foam, dishcloth, card, kitchen roll, plastic bag, bubble wrap, burlap and more. We each chose an insulator to test and waited to see which would be the most effective. In each of the groups, we found that the foam was the best insulator, and one ice cube wrapped in foam even lasted 4hours and 30mins! We couldn’t believe it! Check out the photos of our investigation below:

4th Class have been learning about ‘Music in Movies’, the stave, and sheet music in Music class, and they have been learning about Colour Theory and The Colour Wheel in Art class. We decided to combine our new learning and create some wonderful pieces of art! We turned our colour wheels into umbrellas and watched a clip from ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ to inspire our rainy pictures. You ay not believe this, but we created our colour wheels out of just red, blue and yellow paint. We had to use these primary colours to create the secondary and tertiary colours in our colour wheels. Take a look at our work below:

This term we are learning how to use the iMovie app in our ICT time. To start with, our first iMovie project is to create an iMovie which will be shown to Junior Infants to welcome them to our lovely school. We have taken photos of different places as well as some people around our school, and are now working on creating a movie with them. We can’t wait to share them with the Infants and we hope they find them helpful as they settle in to Springdale.

We have been starting to study the features of recount writing. We learned that a recount is when we retell something that has happened in the past. A recount is always written in chronological order. We also learned that recount is not always written, it can be spoken, it could be drawn, videoed, or photographed! Here we are practising oral recounts in our ‘Roll a Recount’ activity…

We’ve been spending time getting to know each other again after the long summer break as well as discussing how to be a good friend. We learned a little about our favourite subjects and how we learn best by doing a class survey. You can see it below! We also spent some time creating a friendship web with wool where we found many things we have in common with each other. Check out our work below:

Shortly afterwards, we focused on times when friendships can go wrong. Friends can sometimes experience conflicts and it’s important we know how to deal with them properly so that we can sort things out fairly. We were given some scenarios to role play and had to show a good way of resolving a conflict in our dramas. Here we are in action!