Polly the Polar Bear is going to teach us
all about Polar Bears and how they are endangered.
Brigid, our Biodiversity Bee
is going to teach Polly all about bees
and why they are threatened.
If the slideshow isn’t coming up for you, please follow this link to see it.
We enjoyed looking at the slideshows
Room 5, Melville School, Hamilton, New Zealand
did which let us see what their school looked like.
We were amazed to see blue skies and sunshine there
during what was our Winter.
Now Summer has at last arrived here,
we thought our school was looking at it’s best,
so we took some photos,
Thanks for the GREAT idea, Room 5.
A Tour of Our School on PhotoPeach
We spent the past few weeks looking at masterpieces of trees:
Van Gogh’s ‘The Mulberry Tree’
Mondrian’s ‘Gray Tree’
and Emily Carr’s ‘Forest’
Georgia O’Keeffe’s ‘The Lawrence Tree’
and Klimt’s ‘Tree of Life’.
You can see more of this work on other posts
Now having studied these works of art and trees ‘in real life’,
we will draw our own trees.
Before this project the most popular way
of drawing trees in the class was often like this:
However take a look at this slideshow
of the trees we drew since:
Perhaps after looking at our trees you might guess
which artist’s work we liked the best.
Was it Van Gogh’s colourful ‘Mulberry Tree?’
or Emily Carr’s ‘Forest’.
In fact as you can see from the graph below,
one artist’s work was a runaway success.
The children explained their choice by saying that
there seemed to be something ‘magical’
about Klimt’s ‘Tree of Life’
When our friend at Junior Art Gallery posted this link on their blog…
encouraging us to do the interesting art, that is on this link in turn
2nd Class, Room 6 didn’t need to be asked twice.
We chose to begin with
Van Gogh’s ‘The Mulberry Tree’
and the very different ‘Gray Tree’ by Mondrian
and tried to create our own versions.
The Mulberry Tree is colourful
and not surprisingly The Gray Tree is very grey.
Over the next few weeks
we will take a look at the other trees on this link:
‘Lawrence Tree’ by Georgia O’Keeffe,
‘Forest’ by Emily Carr,
‘Pine Tree Screen’ by Hasegawa Tohaku
and ‘The Tree of Life’ by Gustav Klimt.
We are working towards then, drawing
our own trees experimenting with
colour, shape, and angle as these
artists have done.
‘Trees’ by 2nd Class Room 6 on PhotoPeach
Many thanks to Junior Art Gallery for pointing us in the direction of this great idea.
DLTK Kids Artwork Ideas (Arbor Day)
This is the link to the 2nd part of this project 🙂
Click on ‘Continue Reading’ below to comment.
We are following the programme in comprehension:
‘Building Bridges of Understanding’.
We are learning comprehension strategies.
As a whole-school, we concentrated on ‘prediction’ in September and October.
Now we are practising ‘visualization’.
We are reading ‘The Hodgeheg’ by Dick King Smith.
We are also learning a lot about hedgehogs and road safety in class too.
Nicole drew this one:
We drew lots of pictures to illustrate The Hedgehog Family:
Ma, Pa, Peony, Petunia, Pansy and Max.
This is Owen’s one to show you the family…
‘… sitting in a flower-bed at their home,
the garden of Number 5A
of a row of semi-detached houses
in a suburban street.‘
This is Julia’s
Some other children also drew what they could visualize when we read:
‘On the other side of the road was a Park,
very popular with the local hedgehogs
on account of the good hunting it offered.
As well as worms and slugs and snails,
which they could find in their own gardens,
there were special attractions in the Park.
Mice lived under the Bandstand,
feasting on the crumbs
dropped from listeners’ sandwiches;
frogs dwelt in the Lily-Pond,
and in the Ornamental Gardens
grass-snakes slithered through the shrubbery’.
JC included all these special features.
Here are our visualizations:
Visualizing ‘The Hodgeheg’ by Dick King Smith on PhotoPeach
Here is an Animoto of our work:
We would love to hear what you think of our work.
If you would like to comment,
please double click
‘Continue Reading’ below
and a comment box will appear.
A Reminder:
Please don’t leave your child to explore online unattended
The internet is a portal to the world outside. Children should be supervised.
This one is Tom’s.
Click on the link below to see all our names on
‘Can you see my name?’ on PhotoPeach
Photopeach is used by teachers and students in hundreds of schools world wide,
for example schools in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, the UK and more.
However please supervise your children when they are online and on Photopeach.
Thank you.
We are working on comprehension strategies
in reading, following the
‘Building Bridges of Understanding’ programme.
We spent the first six weeks of the school term
predicting what was going to happen next
in the stories we read.
Now we are adding ‘visualization’ to our skill set.
Teacher has read six short novels in class this year.
This one is our favourite by far.
“…Outside a light wind was blowing
the last of the storm clouds away.
In the east there was a glow,
and streaks of pink and violet
and duck-egg green tinged
the darker edge of the sky”.
From: ‘It Was A Dark And Stormy Night’
by Janet and Allan Ahlberg
Teacher thinks Nicole has visualized the sky at dawn, very well:
We all worked hard on ‘visualizing’ as you will see:
‘It Was A Dark And Stormy Night’ by Allan Ahlberg
As always I would remind you to supervise your child when they are online.
Jake visualizes ‘The Pirate Ship’.
Click here to see our book review and to hear our podcast.
We are taking part in a collaborative project about
the signs of Autumn
on Twitter
during this first week of October.
We are tweeting photos and comments
about signs of Autumn that we see #anfomhar.
You can see more details about this project
on the following link:
All about the Signs of Autumn Twitter Project on Seomra Ranga.com
Teacher looks forward to this great opportunity to introduce the class to the uses of Twitter.
As always I am very conscious of online safety.
No photographs of the children will be used
and I will only use the children’s first names.
This is the project so far, at the half way point:
Can you see the Autumn photo you took today? (PhotoPeach)
Please supervise your child when they are online.
Toward the end of June the children in Room 6 answered an invitation
issued by The Irish Times newspaper to nominate their favourite shop.
The children nominated Mrs. Mooney’s Sweetshop.
24 Reasons that Mrs.Mooney’s Shop is Special
Today the Irish Times said that they received THOUSANDS of nominations.
But guess what ?
Mrs. Mooney’s Sweetshop is on their shortlist of the 50 Best Shops in Ireland 🙂
Well done boys and girls and many congratulations to Mrs. Mooney.
We watched the Elephant March from the Disney Classic ‘The Jungle Book’ paying careful attention to the artwork and then we did our own jungle pictures.
This one is Sinead’s:
This one is Mak’s:
You can see all of the finished painting by clicking on this link.
Be careful … It’s a jungle out there !
Remember that it is literally ‘a jungle out there’ on the world wide web and always remember to supervise your child’s online activities 🙂
We hope you like our pictures.
When we read ‘Emlyn’s Moon’ by Jenny Nimmo, one of the characters, Nia made a collage.
We thought this was a good idea and decided to make one too.
This one is Aoibhin’s to see the other works of art click on the link above.
What we found out about Jenny Nimmo.
Her Childhood
Jenny Nimmo was born on 15th January 1944.
To start with there was just her and her Mum.
Then they moved to her uncle’s free-range chicken farm.
When she was only six Jenny was sent away to boarding school.
It must have been hard to be so far away from her Mum.
It isn’t surprising that she didn’t enjoy boarding school.
She was was happier when she went to a secondary school.
She was told that she should become an actress.
At school, Jenny was quiet but she could be giddy too.
She loved to make people laugh.
Jenny Nimmo always loved reading and writing.
She read all the books in the junior school library by the time she was nine.
She had to persuade the librarian to let her join the senior school library.
Now she is an adult…
Jenny now lives in Wales with her family.
She writes after she has done her chores and fed all the chickens, rabbits and cats!
This is how she writes
She uses a soft, 3B pencil
and rewrites, makes changes and proof reads as she goes along.
When she’s sure she has made all the changes, she wants to,
her husband reads the story
and types it for her.
Her books
Many of her books are about ‘magic’ in real life situations.
The books that she has written that we have read are
‘Tom and the Pterosaur’,
‘The Owl Tree’,
‘The Stone Mouse’
‘The Dog Star’
‘The Snow Spider’
but she has written many, many more.
by Aoibhin and Nadine
THE STONE MOUSE and THE OWL TREE and THE DOG STAR were all written by Jenny Nimmo.
How are these stories the same?
How are they different?
Of the three books, which is your favourite?
Why is it your favourite?
Maks’s illustrations really brought his project to life.
Projects about people in history.
Now we are doing projects about people.
Our first project was about Isambard Kingdom Brunel who was born in 1806.
He was an engineer who designed steamships, bridges and tunnels.
He engineered the railway line between Bray and Greystones.
Next we are going to learn about Elizabeth Whitshed
and her husband Colonel Frederick Burnaby.
Lots of places in our local area are called after Colonel Burnaby.
Colonel Frederick Burnaby was a Victorian celebrity: a soldier, adventurer, and writer.
He and his new wife Elizabeth Whitshed travelled to North Africa on honeymoon,
but due to delicate health, Elizabeth returned to Greystones.
She moved to Switzerland for health reasons.
Colonel Burnaby was killed in action (near Khartoum in Sudan) in 1885.
Elizabeth went on to become a mountain climber and alpine expert. S
he married twice more and lived to the ripe old age of 73.
http://www.timetoast.com/timelines/63948
Other projects are planned on
Inventors: Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein.
Did you know that both of them found school difficult?
and
Authors: JK Rowlings and Roald Dahl.
Today we did Self Portraits in Art.
This one is Mak’s.
Hi there Sinead!
Happy Birthday Stacey 🙂
Earlier in the week we made mice out of clay.
Today we made a house for our mouse.
We used a shoebox, catalogues and recycled materials.
CLICK HERE TO SEE HOW WE DID
Laura had a good idea …
CLAY OWLS IN A COLLAGE HABITAT
Last week we made clay owls and placed them in a collage habitat.
HERE THEY ARE 🙂
Owl Habitats on PhotoPeach
Full list of artists still to be added.
Nadine’s ‘Owl Eyes’
We have begun to do projects in class. In a little while we will be doing projects for homework.
We are reading ‘The Owl Who Was Afraid Of The Dark’ by Jill Tomlinson. We are doing a project about owls.
We used the Enchanted Learning website for information.
ALL ABOUT OWLS ON ENCHANTED LEARNING
The children were particularly interested in the subject of owl pellets.
We used this site KIDWINGS
The class enjoyed listening to recordings of owls. There are some on the Kidwings site mentioned about but they much preferred the audios of owls screeching.
These following links come with a ‘Government Health Warning’ as some of the owl screeches can sound rather shrill.
LOTS OF OWL SOUNDS ON ‘OWL PAGES’
and
EVEN MORE FROM ‘JUNGLE WALK’
National Geographic for Kids can be accessed HERE
Laura’s ‘Owl Eyes’.
OUR WORK ON PHOTOPEACH
The internet is fantastic for researching project work, but please supervise your child’s use of same.
Update 15th January 2013
Today we found this lovely website with a video of a barn owl in flight. If you look further down the page on the right, you will see there is also an audio of what the barn owl sounds like.
Barn Owls have been spotted in our neighbourhood. We are going to look out for barn owls when we are walking at night. They fly silently but they have a very loud screech.
Great website about nature. This is a link to a barn owl in flight.
Today we did art using brown paper bags and oil pastel crayons.
Foxes were a popular subject.
Face masks were too.
YOU CAN SEE MORE OF OUR WORK ON PHOTOPEACH BY CLICKING HERE.
Riona’s picture: A diluted paint ‘wash’ over oil pastel crayons.
You can see other class art work on the theme of Light in the Dark at;
‘Lights in the Dark’ on Photopeach.
