September was a very busy month in the two Junior Infants’ classes. Both classes settled in really quickly to our school. The children were learning all about themselves and their body parts. Using Aistear during our learning through play time, hospitals were designed and built, doctors and nurses were busy attending to patients with all sorts of ailments, whilst receptionists made the appointments, classroom toys and junk art transformed into interesting medical tools including stethoscopes, injections, computers as well as needle shooters and blood suckers! Our x-ray departments were very busy and some print-outs from monitors were passed to our doctors too.

The children were building up their fine motor skills and hand-strength through activities such as cutting, beading, peg boards, using tweezers, whilst also developing their maths skills at the same time. We read many stories together – we even managed to use our outdoor classroom area for one story – and learned some new rhymes and songs too. Our reading journey began as we learned the sounds of the following letters: s, a, t, i, p, n, c, k. We are able to spot them in the world around us and are starting to put them together to blend words. During Learn Together, we talked about being in school and how we can help one another in our classrooms and yard to learn and play. We also learned about the Jewish festival of Rosh Hashanah and we even used our sense of taste to try dipping apple slices into honey – the consensus was… YUM!