This week was Catholic Education week in school.   Pope Benedict XVI wants us to become saints for the 21st century so we watched a programme about a very famous saint called Saint Bernadette who lived over 100 years ago in France.  We learned that she was just a poor young girl but Our Lady appeared to her at Lourdes and miracles began to happen.  Today hundreds of people still visit there hoping they can be helped too.  Next week we will be learning about Saint Francis of Assisi.

Following on from the visit from Brother Douglas, we also looked at the way people live in a poor village in Bangladesh called Gankul.  We learned how they plant rice in paddy fields.  It is really muddy because of the monsoon – that’s the name for the heavy rain they get in that part of the world.  The children wear no shoes and their feet are covered in mud.  It made us sad to see how poor they are compared to us.  The women work hard collecting tea leaves and carry very heavy loads on their heads.  We now have a very large globe in our class and we can see the different countries where these people live!  

This week a lot of us earned our certificates for good behaviour in class.   Here are some of our reward charts.  We can earn a juggling ball each day if we stay on GREEN!  We need 10 to earn a certificate.

In literacy we have been learning about the past tense of verbs.  We played a game on the whiteboard called Blast the Rocket, where we had to match the present tense word with the past tense of verbs.  It was fun!  Then we completed a worksheet to check our learning.  Here is some of our work.

We also read a traditional story about Little Red Riding Hood.  Then we had to write the story ourselves just up to the part when Little Red Riding Hood discovered that it was a wolf in the bed not her grandmother!!  We read another version of the story but this time, it was Little Red Riding Hood who was naughty, and the wolf was the good person in the story…..very confusing!!  Then we had to finish our own stories off but think up a different ending.  We were very busy doing this activity… and this led on to a Maths activity, where we had to count the goodies in Little Red Riding Hood’s basket.  Here is some of our work.

Later we had to solve a problem about the Red Hood!  We received this letter from Red Riding Hood –

We discussed it at circle time and wondered how we could advise Red Riding Hood to deal with this problem.  She couldn’t hurt her Grandma’s feelings…and her mum couldn’t afford to buy something else!  We decided that we could perhaps advise her to change the hood a little to make it look more ‘cool’.  To sort out the teasing, we thought she should either just laugh it off, or ignore it.  She could also tell her teacher who might be able to help.  We wrote our ideas in a letter.

We made a start on learning some songs for our assembly, which is at the end of March.  We think it will be fun.

 Oh, and before we forget, our teacher told us she has a new addition to her family.  Here’s a picture of Rusty the puppy!  Isn’t he cute?