Big School News: Senior Infants Update

Welcome back to more Big School News!

This post concerns the wonderful work taking place in our Senior Infants class so be prepared for some spectacular samples of their activity.

Firstly we’d like to say thank you to all the visitors to our blog, we really appreciate your support and interest. There have been some extremely busy days on the blog, with Monday 20th Sept seeing 94 visitors in 24hrs! In total, as this piece is being written, we have received almost 500 visitors in the past 6 weeks. To anyone unfamiliar with blogging stats this is really positive and we are very pleased that your interest is so high.

There are so many fantastic purposes of blogging for a Montessori school but the paramount one for Hedley Park  is facilitating our parents sharing the precious moments of their child’s school days at home and with family members near and far. So please feel free to send the link to aunties, uncles, grandparents and cousins! There are special buttons at the bottom if you use Facebook or Twitter too!

With that, we are bursting with news from Senior Infants. The newly graduated big school juniors are now well installed as the  second year sophomores and have even welcomed some new students to their group. With almost a month completed they are working up a storm. The main themes for their studies this month have been Autumn and Africa. (alliteration not intentional 🙂)

Learning about the Seasons is an integral part of the curriculum, it allows children to experience and appreciate nature, while honing their discrimination for colour, texture, scent and taste. Talking about nature scenes and experiences allows children to develop their written and spoken language confidence. Finally the cyclic nature of the seasons appeals to the young childs sense of order and curiosity and inspires them to experiment with and question the changes in the world around them.

With the help of our artistic Emma the Senior Infants created their magnificent autumn sensorial wall complete with tree, tactile hedgehogs, leaf collages collected from nature walks in Merrion Square and a badger at home in his sett.

Autumnal Tree & Badger Sett

To supplement the autumn wall Aoife encouraged the students to perfect their written language and individual drawings with their descriptive seasonal handwriting samples.

Autumn Handwriting Samples

Our class themes frame and support the national curriculum workbooks used in class, while the Montessori method and materials allow the student to independently build on and concrete their learning in a hands on way that really resonates and remains long after the learning unit has been completed.

The second major theme of study for the Senior Infants is the continent of Africa. They have chosen to focus on Ancient Egyptian culture alongside African traditional jewelery, customs and topography.

Pyramids & Pharaohs

African Masai collars

The final thing Senior infants wanted to share with you is their wonderful handwriting samples on their African adventure

African Desert Handwriting

So as you can see the Senior Infants are getting stuck in and their work shows the effort put in by all concerned.

Thanks for reading our update!

Best wishes from all the staff and students of the Big School.