Junior Infants go to the supermarket!

Welcome back to all the wonderful boys and girls in Grace Park, we are glad that everyone had a happy and safe Autumn break!

Claire and Caroline's Junior Infants have been straight back to work and play this week with the introduction of Aistear everyday. Aistear is a curriculum framework for children from birth to six years in Ireland. It aims to provide enjoyable and challenging learning experiences through play based learning, so that all children can grow and develop as competent and confident learners.

This month our Aistear theme will be the supermarket. Firstly, we discussed everything we know about supermarkets. We had very interesting conversations about our favourite foods to buy, different supermarkets in our locality and all the different things we might see in a supermarket. We practiced being shopkeepers and customers, and learned lots of new words to use in our drama centre.

Everyday before we begin playing we plan in our groups what we would like to make, build or do in our play centre and after we review what we have done and discuss if we would make any changes. We call this 'Plan, Do and Review'.

Then it's time for the fun to begin!

Our first Aistear centre this week was the socio-dramatic centre. We transformed one corner of our classroom into a supermarket and had lots of fun acting as shopkeepers and customers. We wrote shopping lists, counted our money and filled our trolleys with lots of yummy food!

Some boys and girls were busy at the playdough centre making fruits, vegetables and pizzas. We even made some bread from the story we have been reading 'The Little Red Hen'.

Our junk art centre was full of fantastic ideas. We used lots of recycled materials to design and create lots of things. We saw butterflies, pirate ships, pizzas, trolleys and binoculars to name a few things! We really loved using our imagination to transform our junk into a masterpiece!

At the small world centre we used our dolls house and some boxes to create a supermarket. We made shelves for the foods and even some beds for our small world characters to sleep in after a busy day shopping!

Lots of budding architects can be seen at the construction centre. We love using our Aistear blocks to build a supermarket and a village. We also made race tracks, bridges and towers.

Claire's class used their Maths skills to talk about tall and small towers. We had lots of fun trying to build a tower even taller than Claire...and had even more fun when it came crashing down!

We are really looking forward to seeing what the next few weeks have in store for our Supermarket theme, and are already excited about what our next theme will be!

Slán go fóill a chairde!