Friday, December 19, 2014

Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Snow globes

We made some lovely snow globes
complete with cotton wool snowmen and lots of glitter.
We are very proud of them!


Monday, December 15, 2014

Christmas plays

We went to the halla today to see two amazing Christmas plays.
Ms. Crotty's Junior Infants and Ms. Flaherty's Senior Infant classes each put on a Christmas play.
The plays were absolutely wonderful.  Such great actors, actresses and singers.
Well done to both classes.

We also listened to a story from Germany of the first Christmas tree.
What a great story.

Friday, December 12, 2014

Brass instruments

We learned about string instruments.  Today it was the turn of the brass instruments.
Teacher brought two instruments for us to look at:
The flugel horn (a coronet or trumpet and a much larger euphonium).
The flugel horn has a much higher sound than a euphonium because it is much smaller.
We listened to Jingle Bells and Twinkle Twinkle on both.
Teacher showed us how to vibrate our lips in case we ever try these instruments.

Here are other instruments in the brass family:


Katri came to visit us today.
As well as the lots of nice songs, rhymes, solfa s m d and action songs, we also played a fun game with hidden animals.



Wednesday, December 10, 2014

String instruments and a violin

We love learning about the string instruments in an orchestra.
Listen to the music each of the string instruments make.
We are really lucky...Ms. Kelly plays the violin in an orchestra.
She brought it to school today and showed us how to play it.
We looked at the bow made from horse hair and we listened to the sound of the violin being plucked and being bowed.
We noticed that the strings vibrate when they are plucked.
Ms. Kelly showed us what music looks like to read.  It is very different from reading ordinary books.
We especially loved hearing Ms. Kelly play.

Tuesday, December 9, 2014

Music from the string family

We were talking about the different sounds a bear family might make and about the different instruments in the string family.
We learned about the violin, viola, cello and double base.
We know which has the highest note and which has the lowest note.
 We enjoyed listening to music made by each of the instruments.

Monday, December 8, 2014

Christmas art

Here we are painting toilet rolls. We also coloured and cut out lovely angels and we stuck the angels to the toilet rolls when they were dry. They turned out beautifully!!!
Advent Wreaths

Winter woodland

Have a look at these winter trees we made recently.  If you look carefully you will see that there are 5 different pieces (somewhat akin to jigsaw pieces!). We cut these out carefully and then we stuck them to a blank A-4 sheet of white paper, making sure that as we did so, we put the pieces in the correct place and left a little gap in between each piece, which formed our tree. When we put all our winter trees together, we formed a lovely winter woodland scene.

Using instruments to accompany our song

We learned a new song called 'What shall we do in our work today?' and afterwards we chose various instruments to go with the different occupations mentioned in the song. We used maracas, triangles, woodblocks and guiros. We had to remember when to come in and we also had to be mindful of the beat of the music.