Class 15
Class15's February Update
Class 15 have enjoyed their transport topic during February and their Winter art and trips to Tesco - quite the enthusiastic shoppers!
Valentine's was a lovely celebration. making cards and having fun with their friends at the disco!
Class 15's January update
Welcome 2024!!
Class 15 are back after the Christmas break and we have enjoyed painting amazing fireworks for our New Year Celebration art! We have also had lots of fun exploring Winter during activity based learning. We had a birthday boy in class 15 and we celebrated with a very yummy chocolate cake! Delicious!
Class 15's December 2023 update
What a December in class 15! Festive shopping in Tesco - showing our numeracy skills, Christmas cards and friendship groups! Enjoying our Christmas themed activity based learning and lots of fun during Christmas jumper day and our Christmas show!
Class 15's November update
Class 15 have enjoyed their trips to Tesco and Solitude Park. We have been working hard at our classroom jobs and group activities.
Today we started our first Christmas Art - it's four weeks before our special visitor arrives! So exciting!
Class 15's October update
Class 15 has had a "scarily" busy October. We have continued with our food journey topic and sesonal change, where we have had the opportunity to engage in forest school investigations. Our highlight has to be our first outing to Tesco's where we practised our numeracy skills and later on in the month, flexed our muscles in Solitude park. We have enjoyed our Halloween cookery, art and fun ABL activities.
Class 15 September 2023 update
Class 15 have had a busy start to the beginning of the year. We have enjoyed investigating our food journery topic, the start of our autumn and seasonal experiences and we have been perfecting our cookery skills.
june 2023
May 2023
april 2023
March 2023
February 2023
January 2023
december 2022
Check out our Class trip on Wednesday 14 December.
Here we are making all of our Christmas Crafts that we sold at the Autism NI Christmas Fayre in Banbridge Leisure Centre. Don't panic some are still available for purchase from the school.
November 2022
October 2022
September 2022
June 2022
My goodness, our last month of school. How did that happen?! This month we made, painted and varnished some beautiful bird boxes that will go up on trees around the school. We also made time for a trip to Tyrella Beach along with Class 16 and Leavers. We loved splashing in the water and soaking the staff. Our chippie picnic lunch was absolutely delicious too!
This half of term we were allowed to pick our own topic. We chose animation and made some wonderful stop motion short movies. The topic was a big hit and all we can say is 'watch this space next year... we have big plans!'
As we look forward to summer we are busy helping to tidy up around the school. Tomorrow we are going to do a litter pick and clean our bell tent; hopefully the sunshine will come out to help us do all of this.
April 2022
The time to Easter has flown in. In Class 15 we have been very creative in finishing off our colour topic. We made some festively coloured Easter bunting, decorated eggs for our egg drop challenge and produced some beautiful neon artworks. We also glazed our pottery flowers, and made and fired chocolate egg catapults. To top off the Easter festivities we even got to hold some wee chicks - thank you Leavers Class!
Donard School had a very fun Showstopper Challenge where we had to produce a table based upon a theme with one edible element. Class 15 were very ambitious and we made a fantastic farm scene with an edible ploughed field and edible haystacks. The boys worked very hard on this and we are so proud of them!
We can also now show you some of our lovely tapestries that we made made for Mother's Day. We had some very happy mummys.
Have a Very Happy Easter from all at Class 15.
MARCH 2022
We have had a fun March further exploring our colour topic amongst other activities. We undertook a challenge for British Science Week where we had to create a tower from mini marshmallows and spaghetti - we learned that this is a lot harder than we thought it would be. For history we researched Thomas Jefferson and Michelangelo - two very impressive historical figures.
We have had a very creative month: light up cards for St Patrick's Day, a fabulous Mother's Day gift we know our mum's will love (under wraps until the big day) and a clay flower with pottery with Mount Ida Pottery which will have pride of place in our school gardens.
The highlight of this month was our first school outing since the arrival of Covid-19. We went on a trip to Tollymore Forest Park where we had a walk through the forest guided by Field Studies Ireland who told us about our surroundings and the animals and plants that live there. The sun was out for the trip, we were able to ditch the coats and we also were able to share this experience with the Leavers class. A truly wonderful day!
We hope you enjoy our photos!
february 2022
We’ve done a lot this month in Class 15. We’ve created spectacular Valentine’s gifts: 3D heart pictures, heart cards and delicious raspberry ruffles. We also decorated the hallway of our classroom with some heart paintings in the style of Kandinsky.
In Science we are looking at the topic of colour and light and we conducted some experiments into shadows and eclipses. We have also completed some STEAM challenges where we used shot glasses (plastic of course) to build structures.
We have also been busy completing Geography projects where we picked our own country to research and are beginning to make our very own world globes.
In preparation for woodwork in the Spring we also designed and made models of birdhouses.
JANUARY 2022
Happy New Year everyone! We have been busy since we came back to school. We have had a big focus on our wellbeing and enjoyed Wellbeing Week alongside Brew Monday where we made some lovely mug cakes and ate them along with a cuppa while having a chat with friends. The first few weeks we focused on the topic of Winter and we have taken some beautiful photos for our photography project on seasons. We have also started designing some unique birdhouses that we will make in February and March time. They are going to be spectacular!
Our new topic of Colour has begun with a lesson on light from space. We learned about the difference between geocentric and heliocentric and the space enthusiasts in the class taught us more than our teacher did ;) They have promised to bring her up to speed on her planets, stars, black holes and everything space related. This was a lovely break from our IEPs which we have been working hard to finish.
We hope you like our photos.
december 2021
Wow... what a festive few weeks. You might have heard that the Big Event took place last night... the Donard Christmas Craic-er! Well, Class 15 finished all of their crafts just in the nick of time to add to our wonderful stall. You can see our products in the slideshow below. Aren't we talented?!
Last week our teacher lost her voice... not from shouting at us we promise! We thought it was hilarious as she was really squeaky one minute and whispering the next. But each of us was really kind to her and while we did find it funny we also asked if she was okay and needed anything. Such a kind class!
We have taken part in a Santa Run Daily Mile, been to the Belmont Hotel for a spot of Christmas lunch which was so yummy, and enjoyed Festive Fridays where we dressed up in our Christmas jumpers. Even though we were super busy we also managed to finish our gifts for home but we can't tell you what they are as that would ruin the fun on Christmas morning. Let's just say they are very creative and will be enjoyed for years to come.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all from Class 15.
NOVEMBER 2021
Here in Class 15 we have all been busier than Santa’s Elves on Christmas Eve preparing for our Donard Christmas Craic-er! We’ve been sawing, drilling, sanding and stitching beautiful gifts to sell. We hope that all of the Donard families will come along to the event on 16 December to see what we’ve produced… you won’t find finer in any shop!
This month we finished off our World War 2 topic and moved onto Christmas, but we have taken some of our learning with us, in particular the ‘Make Do and Mend’ approach which we are employing in our Christmas workshops.
We have also been cooking up a storm this month making our now traditional Friday scrambled eggs, French toast with chocolate, fruit kebabs and even pizza. Last week we did some work for antibullying week and we produced a beautiful word art with our ‘one kind’ word which was ‘loyal.’ We also squeezed in a trip to Banbridge Driving Range where we had buckets of fun. We hope you enjoy looking at our photos!
October 2021
What a busy month. We have been surrounded by pumpkins, we made pumpkin soup using World War 2 rations, carved pumpkins for Halloween and we even roasted pumpkin seeds with some oil and salt. They were surprisingly tasty!
We also started our photography projects this month and we have included a few of our photos in the slideshow. We can't show too many though as they are going to be used for a special end of year project.
As part of our World War 2 topic we learned about some of the planes that were flown by the Allies and the Axis during the war. We gave making our own paper aeroplanes a go and took to the skies outside our classroom to see whose plane flew the furthest. One got stuck in a tree - whoops!
It was also numeracy week this month and we did lots of lovely activities and bush tucker type trials. Some of us really didn't like the taste of some of the foods - can you find the photo that shows one pupil's reaction to a drink of black tea?!
September 2021
We have had a busy month in Class 15 settling back into school, we have loved being able to see all of our friends again each day and getting to know some new staff members in our room. Our class motto is independence and we are learning to do new things for ourselves like making scrambled eggs for our Friday break, setting up our own obstacle courses in PE, and having responsibility for filing our own work; we've even given Mrs Doyle a run for her money with our tea making skills!
We have also worked a lot on developing a growth mindset and deepening friendships through team based problem-solving activities which we take outdoors if the weather is good enough. We had some fabulous solutions to problems like how to get a team member from point A to B without their feet touching the grass, or filling a cup with water without touching it with our hands.
We hope you enjoy our photos... come back next month for some Hallowe'en fun!
