Living Things

While studying Deforestation and looking at The Amazon Rainforest, 4th Class completed an experiment where they made their own 'rainforest in a jar' to show how water can be recycled in this environment. The class were impressed to see how well their seeds grew in this environment. In comparison to other years though, there wasn't as much growth. Annemarie, the class SNA, took some seeds to grow at home to make a comparison. Her seeds grew better at home so we realised that the classroom was too cold this time to produce more favourable results.

Two images directly above show the more favourable growth in the seeds Anne Marie grew at home.

Senior Infants Autumn Nature Walk
Senior Infants took part in a nature walk to look for signs of Autumn. They noticed how the leaves have changed colour and have fallen off the trees. They learned about hedgehogs and even made their own hedgehogs out of clay in art. 

Aistear-On the farm
For Aistear, we asked one of the parents to bring in a lamb to help us learn about living things on the farm. The class even got to name the lamd christening him 'Snowflake'. Snowflake even came in to visit the oldest students in the school.

Cell Explorers 
We are very lucky in our school that we have a number of parents who work as scientists in MTU. One of our parents organised for Cell Explorers to come to our school. 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th Classes got to learn all about DNA and they got to be real life forensic scientists for the day. They learned what DNA stands for and the different types of DNA- plant and animal DNA. They then got to follow the scientific protocol of extracting DNA from a banana. They children really enjoyed the experiment and learned so much. Thanks again to Joanna, Niamh and their 6th class helpers Bruce, Cillian, Noah, Saoirse, Sophie and Iseult.

Senior Infants Aistear
Senior infants learned all about the work of a doctor in Aistear. They looked at real bone x-rays and learned all about bones and the skeleton. They even created their own skeleton on the arts and crafts station.