We were so lucky to have a visit from the Big Bear Planetarium. It took up the whole multipurpose room!! Each class got a session inside the planetarium and we learned so much about space, the planets and the stars. It was really dark inside and it felt like we were really in space!
Many thanks to Mike Fry who completed the Three Peak Challenge to raise funds for this and to all who sponsored him last year.
The junior infants are learning all about glass this week. Did you know that glass is made from melting sand? We have discovered that glass is rigid, brittle and fragile.
We made stained glass windows for our art lesson this week. It took lots of patience but the results are worth the time and effort.
The Junior Infants are learning about materials for the month of November. We are very busy in our construction site, building and repairing all sorts of things. We are having great fun using our imagination in our small world area and there is no limit to our imagination when we are using our lego to construct buildings!
Today we had a wonderful visitor to our school who shared some of his prized pieces of history with us and some of the amazing stories behind them. Students from 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th classes spent time with Aidan and got the opportunity to share some of their own artifacts with him and their classmates.
Take a look at some pictures from today…
See below the thoughts of some of the 5th and 6th class students about the visit…
It was really interesting learning about his Uncle Joseph who died in World War 1.
I really liked Aidan.He was really helpful and interesting . He is a huge stamp and coin collector and has countless cool artifacts.
What I really liked was the way he told us all about his family. It was really interesting how he had some of his Uncle Joseph’s possessions.
It was so interesting! He told us about his uncle Joseph who got shot through the belt he was wearing and died. Aidan has the belt at home and he said it has a big bullet hole in the back of it, and 3 days before his uncle died, he wrote a letter to his mum to say that he was fit and healthy. He was so interesting and ms Ward was taught how to hold a cigar.
He read us a poem about war called ‘the box’ and it was really moving.
I liked when you were talking about your uncle Joseph and when you were showing me the golf stuff at the end. He had a hat signed by Shane Lowry.
I loved seeing all the amazing antiques people brought in!
I loved how he spoke about antiques and the sad story of his uncle.
I loved it! It was so interesting. The display was really nice! The best part was when he did a poem called ‘The Box’. One of the letters that Joseph wrote was really gruesome and in the trenches, Joseph was fighting and a shell blew off one of the soldiers’ heads. Mainly I loved it!
He is a very interesting man and he had so many things.
I found it interesting when you talked about your uncle and showed us things from World War 2 and World War 1.
Thank you so so much Aidan.
I loved the poem the box because it taught everybody how bad war actually is because when you see it on the news you feel sad for the people in the country but you don’t know how horrible it is and you know that the person that started it is selfish and really mean.
I liked when he was talking about his uncle and I really found it interesting that he had so many different stuff and he put a gas mask on someone.
Aidan was a really nice man who taught me what the biggest lake in Ireland witch is Lockney and about ww1,ww2 and about his brother in the war he was very helpful when people were asking questions. thank you, Aidan.
I loved learning about the stamps and coins and postcards.
Today 5th and 6th class showcased our October projects. These were based on our SESE topics from October which included space, climate change and natural disasters. It is clear from the projects on display that Space Week had a big influence on project topic choice. We invited some classes to come and view our projects and our parents were also invited in at the end of the school day. Take a look at some of our great work below…
More pictures to follow shortly!
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…
