“Being active, staying fit, Gortskehy always does its bit!”, Cathal Tierney, 5th Class

We have been very active in Gortskehy recently for our @activeflag.

We held a competition during November for the children to come up with our active school slogan. The children came up with fantastic ideas. Congratulations to Cathal Tierney, fifth class for coming up with the winning catchy slogan! We had a competition for the infants to draw and colour an active picture. They really enjoyed it and had great pictures!

Great slogan Cathal – WELL DONE from @activeflag👍

— Active School Flag (@ActiveFlag) January 8, 2019

On November 19th we started taking part in the ‘Active Break Every Day Challenge’. Each class had an active break every day. We had a running break, a dance break or an exercise break each day. It really helped us to energise ourselves and concentrate and focus better on our work. We had so much fun during these breaks that we have an active break every day at school now. It helps us to stay healthy!

On the day of our Christmas Holidays we had a Christmas Disco. Each class got to perform a dance in the dance off! It was a really active way to end the term at school and we had a fantastic time dressed up in our Christmas jumpers.

We are going to be taking part in the Operation Transformation 10@10 initiative in January at school and we are looking forward to the challenge!

“Creativity is intelligence having fun.” Albert Einstein

We had great fun with our creativity and imagination celebrating science week in the middle room recently.

We learned all about Alexander Graham Bell and his wonderful inventions. We worked in groups to complete a mini project on his life.

We then decided that we were going to become inventors and design new things ourselves!

We worked together to come up with ideas. We then made a draft of our ideas on paper. We collected recyclable materials at home and brought them in to share with each other. We worked in pairs to create our wonderful inventions. We used our imaginations and we came up with things like robots that can do our homework, drones that can see everything, time machines, ice cream makers, electric bins, day and night tubes, a car that can drive itself and lots more interesting things!

We really enjoyed this project and learned a lot from it.

Who knows, maybe one of us will be a famous inventor like Alexander Graham Bell in the future!

Our senior room have been lucky enough to pair up and become pen pals with pupils from 5^th & 6^th class in SS Peter & Paul Primary School near Wellington New Zealand. In preparation for this each child had to research New Zealand and create a presentation for this. Following completion of this project each class member shared their presentation. Last Wednesday the 28^th of November after a very exciting wait we received our letters and learned the name(s) of our new pen pals. Some of our class were lucky enough to get two pen pals. All of the senior room had the opportunity to share their letter with the class and prepare their replies. Following the sharing of our letters we learned that the schools in New Zealand are very similar to us in many ways and have a very similar school day. Some big differences we noted were the weather, seasons and school holidays. Our pen pals are approaching their summer holidays now and getting excited for the break. We were very excited to send our first reply today and really enjoyed learning new information about our pen pals and life in New Zealand.