last day of school in ireland!

Today we did maths, Spanish, Art, worked on BT presentations, had my farewell and also watched most of the movie "Twister". It is crazy that we can just show it and dont have to send home permissions due to language and whatnot. Does make it a lot easier not having to worry about those things but..... in the states cursing in school is way more looked down upon... as some of the students pointed out to me, you wouldnt be irish if you didnt curse every once in awhile. Interesting to say the least.

I hope to post more later but need to head to bed to be able to wake for my flight home tomorrow morning.

The snowflakes in the window are the ones I taught the kiddos to do and the rest of the pictures are of their lighthouse projects.

Last Week

I hope to get pictures up soon of the snow flake project that I did with the kids for art the other day. I found a more complex way of making snowflakes to give them more of a challenge. When I started in on the lesson with them I ask them if anyone could tell me how snowflakes formed and did a little science background with them. As I walked them through the steps and the diagram I drew on the board I was a little worried that it was too complicated for them. However, they proved me wrong and their snowflakes look fabulous!


Their lighthouses for young scientist look amazing as well, I will try to take some pictures to put up here to show you guys. They are wiring them at the moment.

The students are also working on a presentation in their junior achievement groups. They got invited to the BT headquarters in Ireland to present their findings on the environment and renewable energy to staff there. I am sad that I wouldn't get to see it!

Don't forget you can always see what we are up to on the school site. Click here to see some pictures from our science projects over the past few weeks

Update for this week!

• Teaching English (Creative Writing) tomorrow- going to work with the students on run-on sentences, adverbs, adjectives, punctuation, and concise writing. I am excited to see what they come up with! They are a very creative bunch. When grading their last creative writing assignment I was very impressed! (not to mention, I am still amazed at the wonderful handwriting! I think this is something that U.S. schools could use more of in their curriculum. Due to the limited amount of time in a day it seems like handwriting has kind of gone to the wayside. Cursive has already gotten the axe in a lot of schools. Being able to write legible is something worth while!)
• In science the students will be working with potato and lemon batteries. The big upcoming project though is construction of lighthouses! They have to make a battery to run the light in their lighthouses and construct the whole structure itself.. complete with rocky landscape surround the lighthouse.
• Today the whole school gathered for the send off of Christmas boxes to charity. The students could bring in over the week a wrapped box with items for either a boy or girl for Christmas. A Dublin single decker bus came to the school to pick the boxes up. It was fun to see all the infants extremely excited to see the bus. Overall they collect around 160 boxes! way to go Kill!
• The students had Spanish today and it was great to be able to help out some of the struggling students with the vocab! (Thank you LSN and IB for forcing me to take Spanish!)
• They also had cycle training for P.E. Monday. Only 2 of the kiddos didn't know how to ride but they were persistent in trying. One pretty much had it down by the end of the session, although braking and more controlled steering is a thing we will be working on. No injuries though! (few close wall encounters and almost head on crash with another bike but crisis adverted)
• It is such a great experience to see how a classroom teacher can take on all the extracurricular areas (music, p.e., and art).