With the Christmas season fast approaching, this week has seen a flurry of activity as all classes dusted down the decorations and began to get into the festive spirit. A word of thanks to Patrick Miller from Miller’s Hardware in Portlaoise who supplied us with three beautiful trees. Ewan and his friends in Rang 1 were very eager to check out the quality of the decorations on the trees, while in Junior Infants, the more tinsel, the merrier!!
We applaud Oisin from Rang 4 who came 2nd in the 8-11 age category of the Fire Awareness Coding Challenge run by CoderDojo Ireland recently. This was run in conjunction with Dublin Fire Brigade. The prize was a Raspberry Pi 400 Personal Computer Kit.
Mr O’Mahony presented the prize to a very proud Oisín who couldn’t wait to get home to set up his computer and get going on his next project.
Comhghairdeas, Oisín!
In Rang a hAon, we have been working very hard on our Gaeilge this month. We have been learning about bia and how to make an order at a café. To put our Gaeilge to good use, we decided to have a Maidin Bricfeasta (breakfast morning) in school! It was great fun. We had waiters, menus and order sheets all as Gaeilge!
Bhaineamar an-taitneamh as !
Third Class are looking forward to tuning in to The Late Late Show to see if Ryan Tubridy’s Christmas jumper is a patch on their fabulous designs!
On Friday, we took part in World Diabetes Awareness Day. World Diabetes Day (WDD) was created in 1991 in response to growing concerns about the escalating health threat posed by diabetes. It is marked every year on on a day close to 14 November, the birthday of Sir Frederick Banting, who co-discovered insulin along with Charles Best in 1922.
WDD is the world’s largest diabetes awareness campaign reaching a global audience of over 1 billion people in more than 160 countries. The campaign draws attention to issues of paramount importance to the diabetes world and keeps diabetes firmly in the public and political spotlight.
Two of our pupils in 5th class presented a very informative slideshow to their classmates and we all wore various shades of blue to mark the occasion.
Our final post for Science Week 2021 comes from 6th Class. The boys and girls got busy making oobleck, creating electrical circuits, testing whether eggs were fresh or not, simulating the eruption from a volcano and they even managed to blow up a balloon without touching it!
Third Class welcomed a new classmate for Science Week as “Bobby” stopped by to teach us about the bones in our bodies and the different functions of the skeleton and our muscles.
Many thanks to Edel, one of our parents, for letting us borrow Bobby for the week.
In First Class, we combined Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics during Science Week. As we were exploring the topic of construction, we set about building houses. We thought about the three little pigs and which house would be the strongest. We tested out the stability of our houses using a hairdryer disguised as the Big Bad Wolf!
Velocity, osmosis, dissolving and diffusing, capillary action and density were all explored by Senior infants during Science Week. We made balloon rockets, we put gummy bears in water to see what would happen, we watched as a packet of Skittles make a rainbow, we tried to change the colour of some flowers and we even got raisins to dance up and down!
