Christmas Craft

Here are our Christmas snowmen we made from socks.

Volcanoes

We have been learning about Volcanoes. We decided to make our own volcanoes in Art. We have also been learning about mixing materials in Science so we made one big volcano erupt in class by mixing bicarbonate of soda and vinegar, with a little red food colouring to make it look like lava. It was very exciting to see the 'lava' erupt out of our volcano.

Our trip to the library

On Thursday we took a trip down to the library in Cavan town. We all had a chance to read some of  the lovely books.

Dance

The class have been taking part in dance class every Monday for the past few weeks and are learning a new dance to ‘Merry Christmas Everyone’.

Artefact hunt!

We have been learning about schools in the past. We went on an artefact hunt around St. Clare’s to see could we find old artefacts from the past. We discovered lots of old light switches, sockets and discovered that the school was built in 1969.

Clay creatures

We have been working on clay creatures in Art for the past two weeks. We first made pinch pots out of clay and turned them into creatures by scoring into the clay and adding pieces on like eyes, arms and fins using the score and slip technique. We finished them off by adding some colour.

Rivers

We have been learning about the stages of a river and discussed how water can move materials. We investigated how a river moves materials by using a model. We used cocoa as soil, dried lentils as pebbles and dried beans as rocks. We noticed how the soil travelled all the way along the river from the source to the mouth of the river when we poured in water, while the rocks only moved a little. It was very interesting.

Static Electricity

This week in Science we learned about static electricity. We all had a go at rubbing balloons on our heads and jumpers to build up the static electricity.
We were able to make our hair stand up and pick up little pieces of paper. We also investigated if more rubs on a balloon would mean we could pick up more Rice Krispies. And it turned out we could! With two rubs we couldn't pick up any, but we were able to pick up over 20 Rice Krispies when we had rubbed our balloon 10 times. We recorded our findings on bar charts and the results were very interesting.

Writing with quills

In History we have been looking at what school was like in the past. We learned that they didn't use pens or pencils in the past, but quills and ink wells. We had a go at making our own quills using plastic straws and ink to see what it was like. It was great fun to try, but a bit tricky. We will stick to pencils for now in room 21!

A Starry Cityscape

In Art we had a look at the piece of art 'Nocturne in Black and Gold' by James Abbott McNeill Whistler. We looked at the dark colours and mysterious gold splatters in the sky. We made our own starry pictures inspired by this piece. We used purple and blue paint on blue paper to create an evening sky and splattered on gold and silver paint. We then drew and cut out cityscapes on black card and used chalk to mark in windows to create our scene. They look amazing!

History

In Room 21, we made a 'Classroom Museum' as part of our work in History. We brought in items from the past and had a chance to talk to the class about it. It was really interesting to see what everyone brought in. Some people brought in special toys, photographs, dolls and Ms. Phelan brought in an old fashioned iron!

We also explored games from the past. We got to have a go at playing some of these games. Have a look!