Reading with Author Derek Mulvern

This week we took a trip to Ballybane library, to listen to an author read to us. 

We travelled on a big bus and sang songs along the way. 

Derek Mulveen is from Galway, just like us, and has written books like Oisín the Brave, Moon Adventure and Treasure Island. 

We had great fun listening to him reading his stories to us! We even joined in making using some alien language he taught us! 

We were very happy after our trip to the library! 

Maths for Fun!

This week we invited our parents into our classroom to play some Numeracy games with us! We had so much fun and it was great to have mums and dads helping us to learn in Numeracy! 

Weekly trip to the School Library

We are very lucky in Merlin Woods Primary School to have such an amazing library that we can visit every week. After lunch every Thursday, we all go upstairs and return our library books. We then browse through the many great books and choose a new one to take home for that week. Once we've chosen our books, we have a chance to read them in the quiet space of the library.

Colourstrings

We had our first lesson in Colourstrings today. We met our new Music teacher, Katri, who is from Finland. 

We started the lesson by warming out bodies up...

Then we performed some echo singing, listening and responding to songs and rhythms that Katri performed...

Next we practised some hand signals for solfa. Many of us remembered several hand signals since Senior Infants! 

We then practised performing and composing rhythms...

Finally we listened to some music and described how it made us feel...

The piece of music we are listening to here is very soothing and relaxing!

Hurling training

Today we had hurling training in school! We practised our ground hurling skills. Look at how we are improving our grip on the hurley, our swing, our strike and our block!

Gaelic Football training!

Today we had our first Gaelic Football session with our new coach, Dennis!

We started by doing a quick warm up game. When Dennis shouted 1, we had to put our hands in the air. When he shouted 2, we had to touch the ground and for 3, we had to touch our noses! It was a fun game to start with and helped us to prepare to listen well!

We then practised in groups, firstly rolling the ball to the person opposite us.

After this, we practised hopping the ball across to the other person, using one hand at first....

and then using 2 hands...

We finished the skills part of the session with practising our kicking skills. We had to kick the ball drop our hands against the wall, collect it and pass it to the next person. 

We are very excited about having Gaelic football practice again next week with Dennis and we hope to continue to improve our skills!