Newsletter

6 10 2023

Rinne rang Ciara néalta focal ina rang Gaeilge inniu.

Good afternoon, everyone,

I hope you have had a good week.

It has been a nice week here in school. Beautifully autumnal.

Even though we are just back in school what seems like a few weeks, we are already planning our 24/ 25 school year. Just to let you know Admissions for 24 / 25 will be opening online on October 16th. The link will be on our website.

GAA News D7 Girls advance to the Quarter Finals 

Thursday afternoon saw our final group match versus Gaelscoil Ballymun. Our Girls were magnificent and worked tirelessly all over the field. But for the prowess of the opponent’s goalkeeper, we would have run up a cricket score. Continuing in our fine run of form from the last day, the girls got into their groove early on and were relentless with their point taking. 

Our opposition tried to get back into the game in the second half and did manage to reduce the deficit but by then we were far enough ahead to see out the game. Super performances across the field and a massive contribution from our 5th Class contingent who ably stepped up to the mark. 

As always, our supporters were magnificent, cheering every effort on the field. With each game, the team is gathering momentum, and we will now advance to the knockout rounds. With a short turnaround, they will be in quarter final action next week with an away fixture, most likely against St Oliver Plunkett’s from Malahide but time and details need to be confirmed. Everyone is back training on Monday to help the girls prepare for their big match. 

Arlene, Michael, Niamh & Padraig. 

Carol and Michael’s Senior Infant classes went to Grangegorman for a very informative tree hunt. Michael led the way and taught us about the evergreen oak tree, Hazel, Holly and horse chestnut trees we could find in campus. We even spotted some very new Ash trees along the way. 

We used some autumnal found objects to create some art when we got back to the class 

Active Committee 

Following a strenuous selection process the children above have been successful in applying for a position on this year’s Active Committee. They will assist in maintaining the PE equipment, helping coordinate activities during Active Week, carry out surveys around PE and sports participation and generally assist with PE in the school. There were plenty of very suitable candidates and the standard of their written applications was of the highest calibre but unfortunately spaces were limited. I look forward to working with the group over the school year. 

Padraig 

Coffee morning

There will be a coffee morning for the parents of children with additional needs on Friday 13th October at 8:40am in the staff room. If your child has additional needs, you are very welcome to attend and connect. We have no particular agenda for this coffee morning. It is simply an opportunity to meet with parents who may be on a similar journey, to help and support each other.

Thanks again to Emer who continues to welcome, support and inspire our parents and guardians of children with additional needs.

EU Code Week Launch

By Aaron, Naithí and Aisling

                                        

This morning Veronica’s 5th Class took part in the launch event for EU Code Week 2023. EU Code Week runs from the 7th of October until 22nd October this year. The launch event was a webinar about how to use Scratch. During Code Week schools across Europe will be remixing the code created during the webinar this morning.

The man who organized the event was called Alessandro Bogliolo from Italy. He works as a professor of Computer Science at Urbino University in Italy. He told us that there were 5,600 other people participating in the event from all around Europe. We were one of four schools taking part from Ireland.

The webinar began with him going into Scratch and teaching us that nothing happened when you touched the green flag unless you write the code. When you write code, the sprite (character) would work for example say you put in code “move forward 10 steps” you would go forward. But first you would drag a “when green flag clicked” block in front of it to tell the computer when to begin. 

Then after a while he would show you how to change the character and you could be anyone you wanted, and he picked the Code Week robot. He made it so that you could draw with the sprite (character). Sometime later he showed us how to make circles on scratch with code and later he showed us how to make them multi-coloured. Finally, he showed us how to change the character with a click of a key, very cool.

Thank you, Alessandro Bogliolo and Veronica, for letting us do this activity.

Here is the link to Scratch if you would like to try coding.

Thank you for telling us about this Aaron, Naithí and Aisling.

Lost Property

As you may be aware, Open House are doing tours of our beautiful new school next weekend.

https://openhousedublin.com/locations/dublin-7educate-together-ns/

Unfortunately, it is sold out!

We are doing a little tidy up! We have a mountain of lost property. Thanks to our 6th class volunteers we are going to return most of the clothing to you next week. Keep an eye out on the railing at the front of the school for some items you may be missing.

First Communion 2024

Faith formation classes for children who intend to make their First Holy Communion in 2024 will begin on Wednesday 18th October at 2.15 pm.  The cost of the classes for this term is 88 euro per child.  The deadline for registration of children for the classes is Friday 13th October 2023 and payment must be made in full by this date.  Please pass the word on to any parents/ guardians you think would be interested, as it will not be possible to accommodate pupils to join the classes after the above deadline.  Please contact caitlinniruairc@gmail.com for a copy of the registration form.

Have a lovely weekend,

Fionnuala

Fionnuala McHugh, October 9, 2023