Anyone passing by the school recently may also have noticed our beautiful “Winter wonderland” and “Winter Robins” display in the main front window. Before Christmas, every child in the school contributed to the painting and design of this with the help of local teacher Mrs Mary Meagher. On Friday 10th December, the whole school got wore their Christmas jumpers for Christmas Jumper Day in Aid of the Children`s Health foundation and raised for 334 euro for Crumlin, Temple Street, Tallagh and Connolly Hospitals.
The Senior room also created their own classroom installations of nutcrackers and designed a giant advent calendar. Our 6th class girls, led a Christmas cookie designing workshop for all pupils in the school. As unfortunately we could not host a live production again this year, the 3rd to 6th class pupils created their own musical rendition of “The Night before Christmas”. Children worked in their pods to create art work and record sound effects for each part of the poem. The project was then sent home to parents digitally on the day of the Christmas holidays. Both classes had a very special zoom call from Santa in the North Pole on the day of the holidays, just to check in before Christmas. Thankfully, we were all on the nice list!
The day before the holidays, we also held our annual Christmas Hamper Raffle draw. We had 14 beautiful hampers and managed to raise €996 euro for the school. A huge thank you to all of our families for their generous support and congratulations again to our 14 winners.
Since we have returned in January, the junior room have been busy learning all about “The Chinese New Year” in Aistear. They created lanterns using collage and paper weaving and also constructed their own New Years Parades. They learnt all about the Tiger for the year of 2022 and learnt how to write the names of each animal in the Chinese zodiac in Mandarin. 1st and 2nd class wrote, edited and published their own fairytales in their creative writing workshop and then read them out to the infants during story time.
On 27th January, as part of our Creative Schools Initiative, we had a visit from Graham Fitzpatrick from Biodiversity in Schools. We learnt all about the native birds in Ireland, as well as some interesting facts about where birds came from. The junior room listened to the calls and songs of all the different bird species while the senior room took part in some outdoor games and challenges. All pupils in the school also made their own environmentally friendly, clay bird feeders which they could either bring home, or hang up in the school.