Senior Infants were learning about rabbits during their Science class last week. They were delighted to have Ms. Stapleton’s bunnies, Sampras and Zeus, come to school for the day They learned at first hand how to care for them, hold them and be responsible pet owners. They were very pleased that the weather was nice and they could do their learning outside in their lovely outdoor learning space.
Rang a hAon have been busy exploring the strand of Shape and Space during their Maths lessons. They were learning about area and tessellation and they thoroughly enjoyed working collaboratively and individually on their shape pictures. 
This week, we are celebrating National Biodiversity Week and what better way to explore biodiversity in our local area than to go outside, look and listen. Junior Infants went for a walk along the hedgerows near the school. We found so many creatures, flowers and plants that we never realised were so close to us. We even got to carry out the age-old tradition of blowing some dandelion clocks!
The latest Board of Management meeting was held early this week. You can read the report from this meeting here.
First Class were very lucky to have a special guest teacher on Friday last. Kim, our secretary, came into class and taught us lots of interesting facts about life in South Africa. We tried out some different languages, looked at traditional clothes from South African tribes, learned about animals that we hadn’t heard of before and we even did some gumboot dancing in our wellies! We also loved hearing lots of Kim’s stories about her life before she came to Ratheniska!
Junior Infants are working on an apple theme at the moment. We have been learning all about the parts of an apple, how apples grow, how to cook them and how to stop them from going brown once cut. We discovered that both lemon juice and bread soda would stop them from going brown, but we decided that we wouldn’t like the taste! Instead, we opted for making some apple tart and devoured ever last bit when it came out of the oven!
We are now very fortunate to have the facilities to add another sport to our P.E. curriculum thanks to the addition of basketball frames and hoops which were erected recently. We would like to thank Peter Duignan for constructing the frames and hoops and Colm and Noah (our neighbours) for helping Peter to get them into place. They provide a great opportunity to all classes to further develop the Games Strand of the Primary Curriculum.
