Have you seen the weather outside?! It's so cold! It hailstoned like crazy when we were in maths today. We happened to be doing measurements (using millimeters, centimeters and meters) so we took our rulers outside and measured the hailstones. The biggest ones we found were 5mm long! We decided to see if we could make some snowballs and have a competition to have the longest snowball. It was freezing, but great fun!

5th class are straight back into maths after the Christmas break. We're using our calculators this week, and it can be very funny! They might be faster at computing than our brains, but we don't think they're as clever as us!

We climbed the seven highest peaks in Ireland this week... well, mathematically! We've been looking forward to this multiplication challenge for a while now, and this was the week we finally got around to it. It's intense, but it's so much fun!

Some updates from our room!

We got out in the fine weather to do some of our lessons, and to play with the flipsticks! They are very unpredictable when they bounce, it's great fun! We really have to concentrate on the moves we make, and predict where they might end up if we drop them a certain way.

We've been hard at work with Jolly Phonics. There's a lot of reading to do, but we're up for the challenge! Using different ways of working each day keeps it interesting.

We built crazy shapes with the Geomag set. We discovered how to use the spheres as joints to make our structures move. Then we went wild and smashed all the shapes to fit them back into the box!

We are lucky enough in our room to be able to use two tablets together sometimes. It can get very competitive when we play against each other!

4th class have been extremely busy once again. We have just finished up studying our chapters on Chance. We played a lot of different games and activities to see how chance works in real life, and to use the language of chance. Not only did we learn how to describe chance as fractions or percentages of an outcome, but we got a lot of opportunities to use impossible/never, unlikely, possible/even chance/50-50, likely, and certain/definitely.

Above is us keeping a record of 30 chances to pick random cubes. Only two were blue, while 4 were green. In almost all groups, the green was more likely to be picked.

Next we made our own versions of the cube picking activity, and kept track of how likely it was for a limited colour to be chosen.

In the photos above, you can see us rolling a dice each. We kept track of our rolls for 30 goes. We checked out our combined results and saw that in general, all the numbers had a relatively even chance of being rolled, even if looked like some of us were stuck rolling 3s for a while!

And here we are using a pack of cards to determine chance. We used just one shuffled suit, and kept track of our draws. We were watching for the difference between picking a number card or a picture card, since it was only a 3 in 13 chance that we would get a picture card.

"Black Friday" atá an, so rinneamar ár síopaí féin! Bhí Siopa Spóirt, Siopa na bPeataí agus Siopa Bréagáin againn. Bhí muid ag siopeadóireacth le airgead brégáin, agus bhí ann spórt againn!

Kate has been hard at work on her coding. Keep yourself entertained this Hallowe'en by trying her game 'Doom on the Broom!' (with lots of extra 'ooooo's for creepiness!) Press the green flag to play and shoot the monsters. Watch out for the cat though! It's a good guy, and will give you extra lives!

Click the image below to bring you to the game page.

4th Class are revising their understanding of place value in the thousands. We worked in pairs in our little place value banks, and had to lodge €1000 cheques, €100 notes, €10 notes and €1 coins to make up certain figures. It was harder than it seemed to keep track of all our pretend money! You will also see a photo of our monster pictures - we had to use our quick mental maths to add up the simple sums on the monster and choose the correct colours for his scales. He definitely felt like a Hallowe'en monster at the end!

4th class are working hard on the skills needed for using place value with thousands, hundreds, tens and units. Here they are playing a game using numbered playing cards. The winner is the person who can make the highest number with the cards they pick!

After learning about the myth of the Salmon of Knowledge in class, we looked up some other myths and legends from around the world. We decided to do a project about Theseus and the Minotaur, from Ancient Greece. There were a lot of very strange words and names, but thankfully we had some 5th class experts on hand to help us with pronunciation. When it was all finished, we presented it to 2nd and 3rd class.

Now you can read it yourself - look for it displayed in the school corridor. And - if you're brave enough - see if you can use your finger to navigate the maze! Watch out for any minotaurs!