Your Child's Learning

Our Curriculum

At Mary, Mother of Hope Junior National School we strive to create a centre of educational excellence for the children in our school by delivering a broad and exciting curriculum. Each section of this page contains tips for helping your child in the subject.

Active Learning at Mary, Mother of Hope Junior National School

Active learning involves children learning by doing things. We aim to support our children in their learning and development. We incorporate several programmes based on principles of active learning into our curriculum.

Aistear is the early childhood curriculum framework for all children from birth to six years in Ireland. Click on the link to find out more.

How Parents Can Help

Handwriting Without Tears is a handwriting programme developed in the US. We are introducing this programme into Junior and Senior Infants in 2013. Handwriting without Tears is a unique programme that uses music, movement and fine motor activities to teach children to write. This programme has been successfully used in a number of schools in Ireland that have reported improved standards in handwriting with less
reversals, spacing and letter formation problems.

Junior Infants
Junior Infants will begin by learning all upper case letters, followed by lower case letters. For more information about the Junior Infant programme, click here.

How Parents Can Help

Senior Infants
Senior Infants begin with the lower case letters and then revisit all upper case letters. For more information about the Senior Infant Programme, please click here.

How Parents Can Help

Jolly Phonics is a multi sensory phonics programme which teaches 42 letter sounds through a story, song, action and sound. In Junior and Senior Infants the boys and girls learn all 42 letter sounds. The letter sounds are grouped to support the children in blending sounds together to make words.

In 1st and 2nd Class, the boys and girls learn spellings based on the Jolly Phonics
sounds along with "tricky words" that do not follow the phonics rules.

How Parents Can Help

Active Maths
Maths is taught using a discovery lead approach aimed at supporting children's understanding of maths concepts while making connections with the real world.

Junior and Senior Infants are supported in their learning through games and activities from the Ready Set Go Maths Programme.

Helping your Junior or Senior Infant child with maths - tips and video clips.

1st and 2nd Class continue to learn maths through active discovery with the use of
wide range of resources and games.

Helping your 1st or 2nd Class child with maths - tips and video clips.

Helping your child with subtraction with renaming

Literacy Hour

This year, we are introducing a new initiative called "Literacy Hour" into Senior Infants, 1st Class and 2nd Class. During Literacy Hour, a link teacher (Language/Learning Support/Resource Teacher) will work with the class teacher to help the children develop their literacy skills. The hour session is broken into four different stations. All of the children spend 15 minutes at each station; two of the stations are designed for independent work, at another the boys and girls complete process writing with a teacher and at the last table, the teacher listens to the children reading.

Science

Please take a few minutes to check out our Discover Primary Science Award Video 2018 here