The theme for the month of November was ‘Weather’. The Junior Room was busy learning about various weather conditions and recorded the weather over a week. They also watched a weather forecast and observed the weather for the week in Ireland. 1st Class learned about Francis Beaufort and Anders Celsius in History. In Science, the children investigated temperatures and conducted an experiment to find where the hottest part of the classroom is.
The children explored more of the theme through play. They made weather symbols in playdough, including the sun, a storm cloud and rain by pinching small pieces of playdough. In Construction, they worked with wooden blocks, Lego, Mag Snaps and Mega Blocks to explore making weather symbols including rainbows, a storm cloud and a sun. They also constructed weather stations to gather information about the weather and shelters to protect against the weather. For Small World, the children created a polar region and a desert region and sorted the animals according to their adaptations to a habitat. They role played around the resources given and the polar bears went to one another’s snow caves for a play date! The tuff tray was filled with blue rice for Sensory play. The enjoyed using the various materials to further explore the theme of ‘weather’. The children used white cotton wool for clouds, yellow pompoms for the sun, yellow pipe cleaners for lightning and they enjoy using the stacking rainbows and stones. The enjoyed filling and pouring from containers, pretending it was raining. In Water Play, the Juniors made sensory bottles to represent various weather conditions. They filled water bottles with blue coloured water and then followed steps to represent various weathers, for example, used gemstones to represent hail. They also enjoyed some Numeracy and Literacy puzzles, counting the number of cotton wool pieces to place in the clouds using tweezers in ‘Cloud Count’ and matching uppercase letters to their lowercase letters. For Roleplay, the children set up their weather station, where they researched the incoming weather and broadcasted their findings on the weather forecast. There were a camera crew and sound engineers too. Some terrible weather was forecast for Ireland!
