During our last connection, Dearbhla had taken me via the ipad, on a journey out of the class and down the corridors to see a display she had made from the travelling questions and clues etc and it linked beautifully to the one other special theme they were engaged with… EXPLORERS! They had been researching the likes of:

Marco Polo

Christopher Columbus

Neil Armstrong and so on

So the idea to explore the school and grounds in a new way was very appealing…….

I had made it back to Belfast from my own explorations to Berlin, Leipzig and Dresden and been thinking of all the different ways we might explore something very familiar… how might we do this?

So when we met online on 7th February we chatted about this and how we could think of the school as an ISLAND and all the areas needed to be explored. I suggested the children might have a special power – to be INVISIBLE or DOFHEICTHE in Irish.

(By the way, I am learning lots of new Irish words!!!)

Teacher Dearbhla made sure the children knew what they were trying to do as they ventured out of the classroom to find out what they could about the world out there using different means… and they had to try and pretend that they were stangers to the school!

The children took photographs with ipad

They wrote descriptions of what they saw:

“The simbils are odd. We seen picturs of people”

“The mishens ar weard”

Luka and Fionn saw: playgrounds

Trees

The frog pond

grass

Classrooms

Ciara and Matthew had a special task – Ciara was blindfolded and Matthew led her along the corridors. This is what they reported:

Ciara felt bumps, that felt like books and she said bumped into things – two soft things and the rest were hard!

She heard footsteps going upstairs and finally she thought she was in the library!

We decided that our next visit would be a REAL one and we could explore more and stretch our imaginations even further! See you next week!

Here’s some pictures of trees through unfamiliar windows….