We have had a hectic few weeks in 5th Class since we came back to school in September! I have been getting to know the children and they have been getting to know how much I love Science, Maths, puzzles and maker spaces! LED ‘Glowie Critters’, Tweeting, Izak9, Nano-science and a LEGO Letterkenny are just a few of the things that we have been getting up to.
Our Glowie Critters were great fun to make. The children designed their critters by first choosing two animals that they wanted to combine and after they were happy with their design and had written all of their design notes they put their critters together. The finishing touch to make them ‘Glowie’ were the LEDs!
We attached the LEDs to 3V coin batteries and made sure that the longer leg of the LEDs was attached to the positive side of the battery. We then added them to our critters to make them glow!!
We have set up a class Twitter account and it can be accessed @rangmaggieletns. Almost every day we share information about what we are doing in class. We post pictures of things we have made, resources we have used and we interact with the wider global school community. We hope to link up with a school based in West Virginia in the coming weeks so that we can share our learning with them and find out a little about what they have been learning.
We have been using Izak 9 in our classroom this year. Izak 9 is a hands on problem solving maths resource and we are having great fun using it to develop our problem solving and critical thinking skills. 
There are endless possibilities with Izak 9 and we hope to explore the different ways we can use it in our classroom as the year goes on. This week we used Izak 9 to help us with multiplication and everyone was incredibly engaged!
In other maths news will be accessing Manga High during maths week to hone our number skills and problem solving skills. We are hoping to solve lots of problems and possibly win a prize for the school! Watch out for more news on this!
We have been building Letterkenny out of LEGO which has been lots of fun! We learned a little bit about scale during our nano-science lessons and we applied this to our planning before we started building. 
We have been working collaboratively to make LEGO Letterkenny a reality and we look forward to sharing it on our class blog when we are finished!!
We have been having lots of fun while making Letterkenny and we are really working on developing our collaborative working skills!
We have been working on recount during literacy and we have been writing recounts on different news stories that we have watched and read. In order to change things up a little we decided to invite a guest speaker into our classroom to talk about an adventure that we could write a recount on. 
Danny McFadden very kindly agreed to come and speak to our class and we spent an hour an a half on Monday morning hearing about the 18 months he spent in Antarctica! Danny left Ireland in 19th October 2014 and didn’t return until 17th April 2016!! Danny showed us lots of cool videos and photos of planes, science equipment, seals and of course penguins! We had a great time asking him questions and found out that one of the things he missed the most when he was away was milk!!! We wrote some brilliant recounts after Danny left!
Next week we are looking forward to a visit for Nigel McKelvey for Code Week EU. Nigel is a lecturer in the department of computing at Letterkenny Institute of Technology and he will be visiting us for the entire morning on Monday 17th October to do some coding activities with us. We are lo
oking forward to welcoming Nigel to our class and we can’t wait to take part in Code Week EU! We will share some information on the activities next week and hopefully we will compile some of the photos into a video so that you can see what we got up to!!
We are also getting special ‘techy’ delivery from Athlone Education Centre on Monday… more news on that next week!
Thank you for reading!