This school term we were lucky enough to be successful in our application to participate in a Creative Youth initiative, we took part in a BLAST program and our designated artist was the very talented Catherin Gannon. We decided to create a light installation around the theme of ‘Wellbeing’ which also integrated with our Amber Flag initiative and so our creative journey began.

Catherine’s artistry, support, expertise and the spirit of collaboration helped make this endeavor possible. Over the course of 6 weeks, she developed the children’s initial ideas and a plan was put in place to create small and large emoji’s expressing the children’s feelings, emotions and overall wellbeing. The children also wanted to create a Christmas tree in our light installation as it was being exhibited in December.

The infant classes used oil pastels on tissue paper and bound these around wire structures with tissue paper and glue. They also cut out and pasted card images for their lanterns. The senior room children spent days measuring, shaping and securing willow branches and making supports for our structures. They then soaked tissue paper with glue and covered their willow structures and when dry, decorated them accordingly. In the end we had a terrific Christmas tree and amazing emojis representing lots of different feelings and emotions.

On the evening of the immersive light experience many people from the community joined us to celebrate the children’s work and it was magical. This BLAST project served as a powerful reminder of the importance of wellbeing and self expression, through creativity. Here are some images of the process and end products of our creative journey.

 “We are fit, we are cool, we are Gortskehy National School” 

We are very excited to be renewing our Active Flag this year here in Gortskehy. We launched our initiative on Friday, October 25th as we celebrated Halloween. We had a whole school active line assembly outdoors which was led by our active committee. We finished with a spooky Halloween parade!

Congratulations to Ruth, Laoise and Mia from 3rd and 4th class, for coming up with our catchy slogan!

We are focusing on movement breaks for November. Each class are committing to at least two movement breaks to re-energise, and re-focus throughout the day. We are excited for this.

We are endeavouring to keep our playground as active as possible this year and we are introducing Playground Marshalls to ensure everyone is moving!!

Watch this space as our active year unfolds!

Skeleton spookiness for Halloween! Great work from 3rd and 4th class.