Learning through play: Superheroes, Spring and the 100th day of school
In February we started our Superheroes topic. One of our favourite characters from the stories we read was Supertato and of course his nemesis, the Evil Pea. In art we used real potatoes to create our own Supertatos, and some people even made Evil Peas as well. We set up a Superhero HQ in role play and used Numicon very messily to print skyscrapers for daring rescues. At the literacy table we made our own superhero comics, using lots of wow words to describe things in our writing. This topic also got us really excited about investigating weight in maths and forces in science.
We couldn’t believe it when our 100th day of school arrived! We had been keeping count with lollypop sticks in class, grouping them together into tens as we counted and before we knew it we had reached one hundred. To celebrate this exciting day we took 100 steps to see what 100 felt like, lined up 100 classroom objects to see what 100 looked like and then drew some pictures imagining what WE would look like at 100 years old.
After that Spring finally arrived and with it some visitors: a gang of friendly caterpillars! They stayed with us for a month and we were able to watch them grow, shed their skin, weave their cocoons and finally emerge as beautiful butterflies! In junk art we made different types of insects and spring animals of our own, in construction we built nests, we explored a frog’s life cycle in small world and went for a spring scavenger hunt!
Our messy play got REALLY messy during this topic as we planted over a hundred seeds to raise money for Dublin Hedgehog Rescue. We had met Yvonne and the hedgehogs she rescues earlier this year and both junior and senior infants really wanted to help them. It was hard work planting and caring for our seeds and making posters but it was all worth it when our plant sale raised over €250! Thanks a lot to everybody who bought a plant.