Taking a Walk on the Wild Side- The Canal Way

We went on an educational walk along the Grand Canal. We examined the area of the canal between the 10th and 11th locks. Our guide, Sandra Scully, told us lots about the history of the Grand Canal.

Omer's Lock House (the Lock Keeper's House) c. 1790

We then went walking in the adjacent fields where we spotted various wildlife, trees, and shrubs. We  went looking for frogs. We found two frogs and some of us were brave enough to hold them!

We had some time to pick wild fruits, including blackberries, rosehips and sloe berries. The blackberries were delicious!

Picking Blackberries

Sloe Berries

Charcoal Self Portraits

We used charcoal to draw self portraits. We concentrated on where to put our facial features. We added shading and used rubbers to create lighter areas.

We learned how to position the features on our face in the correct places by drawing horizontal and vertical lines. When we were finished we smudged out the lines with our fingers.

We really enjoyed using charcoal because we could change our work again and again by blending in anything we weren't happy with. Look at the results below.

Reading in Room 17

We've been reading the novel "The Butterfly Lion" by Michael Morpurgo in class. We love Michael Morpurgo and "The Buttefly Lion" is a great book. We've been enjoying reading the chapters and doing lots of vocabulary work, summaries, letters as characters from the story, diary entries and character analysis.

Listen to an excerpt from the novel here: http://michaelmorpurgo.com/books/205

We have also been enjoying some buddy reading over the last few weeks. We are reading in pairs and are doing great work on any unknown words. 

Mé Féin

We have been talking all about Mé Féin (myself) in Irish this month. We did some excellent writing about ourselves as Gaeilge (in Irish). We decorated our writing with images and icons that represent ourselves.