Over the past couple of weeks our Green Schools Committee have been promoting Climate Action Week in our school. As part of this, students were tasked with writing some climate action poems which were read out at assembly this morning. Take a look at our class winners below…
I think it is fair to say that the world and our futures are in great hands!
The Junior Infants got to explore pumpkins today. We carved a pumpkin and got to see (and smell) inside. It was a bit gooey and disgusting! After we carved a pumpkin we made our own collage pumpkin! Keep an eye out for them at the disco!
We were delighted to take a delivery of some brand new sports equipment today.
At the start of the year the Active Committee completed an inventory of our equipment and were shocked at how much PE resources were gone, either missing, broken, stuck in trees etc. We put together a wish list of all the things we needed to buy and this wish list was very kindly covered by our PTA. Many thanks to them for providing this much needed equipment.
The Active Committee have put a more secure system in place around the use of our equipment at break times. The children will be provided with specific playground resources at break times and are not permitted to have unsupervised access to the PE shed at any time. We hope that this will help our equipment to be around for longer. All of our new resources have been labelled and we would ask that if any of it ends up being taken home by accident that it is returned to school as soon as possible
4th class wrote fantastic stories as part of their maths week celebrations and the rest of the classes got to enjoy a story session with them. Well done 4th class, your stories were fantastic!
Junior Infants are learning all about repeating patterns this week and so far its proving to be a lot of fun! Check out the patterns we have made so far!
The children in Seniors Infants and 1st Class had a great week exploring Maths in new ways. On Monday, we went outside and drew mazes on the basketball court - not as easy as it looked to get to the centre! The children worked together to figure out the best way.
Tuesday had us exploring Maths through trails. The children had to make shape pictures using leaves, find blocks and shapes and order objects from largest to smallest.
Wednesday saw us measuring trees - with our thumb! Who knew this was possible! But the tallest tree we found was over 100 feet! (The children’s feet!)
Thursday saw us finding shapes outside and matching these to real life objects - the school roof showed us triangles!
On Friday, 4th Class shared Maths stories that they wrote. These were so enjoyable and the children loved listening to them.
The children also made fantastic Maths Monsters for homework. Some were quite scary!
Well done to everyone!
Junior Infants have been learning all about 2D shapes during maths week this year. We have had great fun all week with lots of hands-on activities including; going on a shape walk around our school, making 2d shapes on our pegboards, tracing shapes in our copies, making pictures with shapes, solving 2d shape puzzles and making 2d shape monsters. We also got to go on a maths trail with help from our big buddies which was so much fun! Check out some pictures from our week
Maths Week 2019 got off to a flying start in 5th and 6th class. On Monday, 5th and 6th class completed some arrow mazes which took lots of figuring out. Once we had gotten to grips with these challenges, we had a go at designing our own for our classmates to solve. Take a look at some of our work below and see if you can solve them…
On Tuesday, 1st October, a group of children from the lunch time running club took part in the Wicklow Athletics Relay competition in Avondale Park.
This was a first for all of these runners and the excitement and nerves were high! We had a girls team from 3rd Class and 5th Class and a boys team from 3rd and 5th also. The team spirit and support the children showed each other was incredible! We are so proud of our runners who ran so well despite high competition from a lot of Wicklow schools.
We look forward to the next competition at the end of the month.
On Thursday, our 5th and 6th class boys represented the school in hurling for the first time in recent years. The boys participated in their first hurling blitz at Bray Emmets GAA club. In the run-up to the competition the boys trained most days during break times, lunch times and PE lessons. Their determination to participate has been immensely admirable. On the day they played 4 matches against some very tough competition. The boys demonstrated tremendous heart in battling right to the end in each match. We are delighted to have linked up with a hurling coach who will be visiting the school in the coming months to help develop our skills further. We will compete in our next hurling competition in March 2020.
The Junior Infants have been exploring light and colour as part of their space topic. The have been looking at primary colours and how we use these colours to create new colours. We made colour wheels using our primary colours and mixing them to make secondary colours and put them together to make a cute display of our work!
Today we held our annual Harvest Service in the church. All classes took part and put on a great display of the work they have been doing around the theme of harvest. They performed beautiful songs, poems and dramas. Thank you to all the parents and friends of our school for coming along, I am sure you will agree that the children put a lot of work in for the service.
A special thank you to everyone who donated non-perishable food items which will all be donated to the Tiglin Centre.
5th and 6th class were celebrating EU code week today by taking part in some hour of code activities. Some of us worked on choreographing characters to dance along with music, while others explored problem solving to escape from various challenge rooms.
This year we are aiming to present projects at the end of each month in 5th and 6th class, and gosh did we kick the year off in style. For September our topic of focus in history, science and geography was the local area and the human body. This afternoon we showcased our projects to the families of the children. For term 1 we are working in groups to complete these projects and it was great to see that groups worked together to incorporate each member’s strengths.
Take a look at the work which was on display…
The Junior Infants have begun the very exciting topic of Space for the month of October. They are exploring the concepts of light and dark, shadows, colours, planets stars and even aliens! We are working hard on working together and our space jigsaws are the perfect activity to encourage team work. We are creating some very creative space pictures. Our imagination knows no bounds in our moon setting small world area and we forget we are not really in space when we dress up as astronauts in our role play area. Take a look at some of the very exciting Aistear activities so far!
All the children had a very special workshop today delivered to them by Mark from Skipnrope.ie. Mark is an expert in all things skipping and all classes got the change to have a full skipping lesson where they were shown some skipping skills and learned new tricks. Skipping is a fundamental movement skill that is very difficult for some children to master so we were delighted that Mark could come in and teach us some new tricks.
Some of the skills the children got to learn and practice were jumping jack skips, shuffling feet forwards and backwards while skipping, skipping on one foot, swinging the rope to the left, the right and then jumping through, criss crossing arms/rope and jumping in between, double unders and the very difficult butterfly/chain skip.
All the children gathered at the end of the day to show of the things that had learned and got to demonstrate their new skills to the rest of the school! We look forward to seeing the children put their new skills into practice over the coming year!
The Junior Infants have been working hard on improving their pencil control skills all month. We have been writing on everything we can from paper to plastic wallets, laminated posters and blackboards. We have used all sorts of writing implements from crayons and pencils to pens and paint! Today we explored a new way of writing by using a stylus pen on the iPads to follow prewriting patterns and the children got great enjoyment out of the special effects that they could create!
All classes were visited by two very responsible students who attended the Bee Festival in Ashford this weekend. They took some information leaflets for our school and gave a very informative talk on how we can all do our bit to help pollinators in our environment. There are some very easy ways in which we can all do our bit to help - how will you help?
Green Schools
The Junior Infants are busy learning all about sorting objects according to a variety of properties. Today we worked in small groups to sort a selection of things.
We then looked around the classroom taking note of how the other groups of items in our room had been sorted and we were able to work together to think of even more creative ways the objects we used could have been sorted!
