A Year of Fun Based Learning in 5th

Fifth class boys have had the busiest and most productive year. They are such a creative and enthusiastic group we were able to create wonderful projects and have real and meaningful active learning. The boys used a variety of strategies throughout the year to cover the fifth-class curriculum. They thrived using group work, peer teaching, station teaching, parallel teaching and child lead activities. These boys in particular have a huge range of skills and talents and they all had their chance to shine this year. It has been amazing to see the growth in their confidence, public speaking, manners, sportsmanship and resilience. We are so proud of theseboys.

We’ve put together some of the highlights of the most exciting events we have participated in this year..

Autism Appreciation Week. We had wonderful discussions about our own strengths and needs and learned many self-regulation skills of our own. We talked about inclusion and kindness. All of our fifth class boys are aware of what their own bodies need to help them learn and quick movement breaks and sensory breaks are encouraged.

We had so manypositive events in our class. We as a class have included just a snippet of our time through photos. We couldn’t possibly mention everything as these boys were constantly engaged in hard work and fun based learning.

We were involved in mini company in November and completely sold out our excellent Toy show boxes. We had board meetings and calculated profit margins and advertised with a fun video. The atmosphere in the school on sales day was electric. It is an event the boys will always remember and hopefully they will be inspired to be business people in the future.

For our Physical Education we went swimming at Aura Leisure Centre and played badminton, tennis, soccer, tag rugby, hockey and made impressive gymnastics routines. We also focused on athletics and running skills, we did map work and orienteering and worked on good sportsmanship and turn taking. We brought back old yard games, capture the flag, ladders, pirate ship and had fun trying team building games. We competed in soccer tournaments and rounders with other classes. Two of our students were on the Cork county champion basketball team. Well doneboys.

In Irish we wrote stories independently and had full conversations in Irish. We also had some craic dancing in Halla for seachtaine na Gaeilge. We improved our comprehension skills and used our word boxes to compose sentences. We recorded sketches as Gaeilge which were fun and really helped us learn our Irish phrases. The last term we focused on Irish verbs which required study and hard work. These boys have a good standard of Irish language and they use it in the