Junior Infants and first class had a fantastic time on their school tour to Smuggler’s Cover in Rosscarbery!

The day kicked off with the bus trip, which was very exciting.  After having a bite to eat on arrival, we tackled the Maze in pairs.  Each pair had to find the letters M A Z E and punch their cards on finding them.  It took quite a while but was great fun altogether.

The Maze had towers that allowed us to get a bird’s eye view!

All of us emerged eventually from the Maze after some great teamwork!

Escape at last!

Then it was on to the crazy golf course.  Luckily we had lots of golf practice earlier in the year during P.E, so we were well prepared……..or so we thought!

This was just one section of the course!

The crazy golf sure took a lot of concentration!

It was difficult to putt the ball up all the slopes and around the curves!

We used a rope pulley to haul ourselves across the water!

Finally, we were all treated to jokes and magic tricks from The Great Tony Baloney!  He was very convincing as a pirate and amazed us with some great feats of magic and his comic genius!  To top it all off, he made us some fun balloons to bring home with us!  Hurray!

Avast ye landlubbers!

Tony and Eric the rabbit who thinks he is a viking!

At the end of April, Junior Infants had a visit from three members of Schull Fire Brigade, who explained their work to us and gave us fire safety advice.

The firemen gave us some very useful advice!

They recommended that every family should decide on an escape route from the house and have an agreed meeting point a safe distance from the house where everybody should head to in the event of a fire.

They also stressed the importance of having smoke alarms in the home and testing them every now and then to make sure that they work.

They also told us that if confronted with a fire, the best thing to do was to get away from it and call for help!

The firemen also brought their fire engine and allowed us to try out some of their equipment, including the hoses and the beaters for fighting gorse fires.

This is the beater, which the firemen use to put out gorse fires!

We got to try out the hoses!

Dylan with his Dad, Brendan!

A big thank you to Schull Fire Brigade for taking the time to visit us!

In April, we focused on the farm during playtime!  We made paper plate animals, played with the toy farm, built lots of farm machinery from lego and made a farm jigsaw!

We worked together to build a farm jigsaw!

We helped each other to cut the masking tape for sticking our farm animals together! We make a good team!

Egg boxes served as great noses for our paper plate animals!

We built roads for tractors to drive on!

We even built milking parlours with the lego!

Working on our animals!

It was fun to build farm machinery and buildings!

Linda Whelton introduced us to her dog Bruce!  She let us pet the dog and showed us his food.  It was a hot day, so we gave him a drink of water!

Linda introduced us to Bruce!

Finally,  Don and Katie Ward visited us with a ewe and her two baby lambs.  We got to pet the lamb and Don and Katie showed us the sheep nuts that the lambs likes to eat!  It was a lovely opportunity to pet  real life farm animals and learn a little more about farm life and how farmers care for their animals!

The lamb was so soft!

The Mammy ewe and her lambs!

We were extremely gentle when petting the lamb!

Thanks very much to Don and Katie for making springtime so special for Junior Infants!

The solar eclipse in March of 2015 happened to coincide with Aistear Space theme in Junior Infants!  We left the lights off in the classroom that morning and we  all noticed our classroom get darker and darker and darker before gradually brightening again as the sun reappeared from behind the moon.

Our Space play was fantastic.  We had our own rocket and command centre where technicians did the countdown before each launch using launch buttons, laptops and equipment made at the creative table.  The creative table also made space helmets for the astronauts.  The sand tray became a lunar landscape, as we made craters on the surface.  The lego table made fantastic rockets and space stations.

Astronauts preparing to board!

Making laptops and other essential equipment for the control centre!

Making craters on the moon!

10, 9, 8, 7, 6, …..

The lego table built rockets and space stations!

The creative table also made launch buttons and telescopes for the astronauts!

Busy creating!

One small step for man…..

Burning the midnight oil in the rocket control centre!

We watched a video clip of an astronaut showing how he brushes his teeth in space and another astronaut describing how she washes her hair.  A tricky business by the looks of things and absolutely fascinating!  Have a look for yourself…..

As part of our S.S.E. programme in Scoil Mhuire N.S. we are encouraging all students to read more often at home and in school. Classes throughout the school are actively taking part in initiatives

such as  S.S.R. (Silent Sustained Reading) and D.E.A.R. (Drop Everything And Read) throughout the school day. Senior Infants and Second Class are Reading Buddies! These classes get together and read together, for and with each other. This has been a huge success and in the following clip it is evident to see that these children have developed a great love of reading and books.

Well done to all throughout the school.

Happy Reading!