Today, the children celebrated Halloween by dressing up and playing traditional Halloween games. There was ducking for apples, bobbing for apples, pin the hat on the witch, cutting the flour and many more. There was also lots of Halloween art with a whole litter of black cats appearing in first and second class! We wish everyone a safe and happy Halloween! School reopens Monday, 6th of November.
We all had great fun today at our very own Science fair. Declan Holmes from Science Ireland set up ten experiments in the hall. 5th and 6th class were shown all the experiments and were given the task of demonstrating them to the whole school. Each class went to the hall and, in small groups, got to visit each of the ten experiments. 5th and 6th class had to show how to do the experiment, explain the Science behind it and answer questions. They did a fantastic job and we could see many future Science teachers. Declan also did an in class workshop with the children which they really enjoyed. Huge thanks to Declan for visiting us today and sharing his knowledge.
3rd and 4th class have been exploring the history of Halloween using the 1930s Folklore Commission School’s Collection on the Dúchas website. The collection has stories about all aspects of life in the 30s, including Halloween customs and traditions. The children used the child friendly search engine Kidrex to search for Dúchas.ie. From here they typed ‘Halloween’ into the toolbar. In pairs, the children read a different article relating to Halloween and reported their findings to the class. The children learned that in some areas, a Halloween custom was for boys to throw cabbage against a wall. Other stories reported that whatever direction the wind was blowing on Halloween night, it would blow that direction for the year. The Dúchas website is a fantastic resource for children to learn about life in the past from children in the 1930s. We are lucky that the Milltown Heritage group have made the Milltown school’s collection available on their website.
The School’s Collection can be explored here https://www.duchas.ie/en/cbes
The School’s Collection for Milltown schools can be explored here https://milltown.galwaycommunityheritage.org/content/topics/schools-collection
Things are starting to get spooky in Milltown National School! 1st and 2nd class are getting ready for Halloween by making these marvelous masks! No tricks, we think these masks are a Halloween treat!
Maths week is in full flow and all the children have been exploring Maths in really active, interesting ways.
Ms. Donoghue organised a maths trail around the school grounds for 3rd to 6th class. The children had tasks such as measuring the length of the school playground, taking a tally of cars passing within 2 minutes and finding symmetrical shapes in the environment.
4th class signed up to Khan Academy so that they could explore this brilliant Maths resource for Maths week.
Maths stations were set up in the hall and all the children took turns to go down and try all the activities. There was Knex, board games, drawing with shapes, card games, IT Maths games, chess, peg boards, tangrams and lots more. It was lovely to see all the children getting hands on with Maths. All the children really enjoyed this exploration of Maths and it was great to see the different classes getting to work and play together.
