Literacy Activities in Senior infants

Handa's Surprise

We are working on the big book 'Handa's Surprise' at present. It is one of teacher's favourite books (and ours too now!!). It is about a girl called Handa, who decides to go to visit her friend, Akeyo, in another village.  Handa carefully places 7 delicious fruits in a basket to bring to Akeyo. However, on her way she encounters (unbeknownst to herself!!!) 7 cheeky animals who each steal a fruit from her basket. Handa would have arrived to Akeyo's village with nothing ,only luckily and in the nick of time, a goat knocks against a tangerine tree and a load of tangerines fall into Handa's basket!! When Handa finally reaches Akeyo's village she is really surprised to find the basket full of tangerines and not full of the 7 delicious fruits she had carefully placed in the basket earlier. Luckily for Handa (and Akeyo too!!) that tangerines are actually Akeyo's favourite fruit!!!
We have been discussing the story in detail and naming our favourite parts and characters. We learned that every story has a beginning, a middle and an end and we picked out and wrote about the beginning, middle and end in Handa's Surprise. We drew our favourite parts of the story and are practising re-telling the story in our own words. We listed the animals in the order that they come in the story and we matched the animal to the fruit that they took in sequence.

Making a fruit salad in Senior infants

As we have been discussing fruit a lot in relation to the story 'Handa's Surprise' and healthy eating in general, we decided to make a healthy fruit salad yesterday , that we could all enjoy and eat together in class. Before we prepared and peeled the fruit etc, we had a good look at it and felt the texture of it. The pineapple was the roughest of all. We also named each fruit and tried to describe it. If the fruit was mentioned in 'Handa's Surprise', we tried to remember how it was described there. For example, the avocado was described as 'creamy, green avocado' and the pineapple was describes as 'spiky-leaved pineapple'. We discussed whether these were good descriptions of the fruits. We had a good variety of fruits in our fruit salad - mango, pineapple, bananas, oranges, tangerines, avocado, apples, kiwi and grapefruit. Some of us had tasted these fruits for the first time and discovered that we really liked them. We will be looking out for them in the shops when we go shopping with our parents. Now that we know how delicious fruit tastes and how good it is for us, we will be eating a lot more fruit!!!

Letter "e" in Senior infants

This week we are learning all about the letter e. We learned a rather lively e song and love the fast music that goes along with it. We know that e is a vowel and we are very good word detectives and have been searching for words beginning with e and also words with the /e/ sound within them. We have also learned how to form both the upper case e and the lower case e correctly. Teacher says that we are champions at doing it now!!

Following procedures: Senior infants

We followed the steps in order and made yummy buns!

Human Letters and Shapes: Senior infants

Dino's letter: Senior infants

Dino had lots of fun in Molly's house.

Here is a letter he wrote to us in Molly's house.

Poisonous pasta: Senior infants

The children wrote a thrilling tale recently about some poisonous pasta.A very unlucky car driver,teacher and duck were unfortunate enough to encounter the disgusting stuff!