This is the story of Noel Joyce an unfortunate hurler who, following a bang to the head, managed to score an own goal and lose the county final for his team. We planned it as part of our weekly Zoom lessons. The pupils recorded their allocated lines at home and we stitched the clips together to create this final video.

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The 13th of June is a national day of FREE creativity for children and young people under 18.

Visit Creative Ireland where you can select your county to see all the free creative activities available on the days leading up to the 13th and on the day itself.

There are many county and national online events that children and young people can participate in.

You may recognise some of the artists from our participation in the Creative Schools programme.

Why not learn how to juggle? 🙂

Last week, we celebrate Creative Schools Week (4th – 8th November).  This was an opportunity to showcase, celebrate and share our creative work that is being undertaken in the school this year to date.  Our key focus within Creative Schools is Music.

This year, our 4th, 5th and 6th classes are taking part in the “Ceilí Ukulele” programme which is run by Music Generation Mayo.

Céilí Ukulele is designed as a 28-week programme over the academic year, with weekly lessons of 60 minutes’ duration.  Over the course of a full academic year, students will aim to learn 15+ songs &  20+ melodies on the ukulele, as well as honing their performance skills through regular group practice and performance.  Each week, our specialist Music Generation Mayo musician-tutor, Keif, visits the school to provide whole-class tuition designed to engage and excite students about playing the ukulele and singing accompanying songs.

We have completed 8 weeks and have learnt so much already.

Here is a video of our talented pupils performing a song accompanied by the ukulele:

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As a participating Creative School with our focus on “Music”,  Junior and Senior Infants went to the Linenhall Arts Centre in Castlebar today to see the musical show, Rockin’Rhymes. This performance is part of the RoolaBoola Festival and was presented by Branar Téatar do Pháistí. Original songs based on the well-loved nursery rhymes will be performed by a live 5-piece band, accompanied by animated illustrations by artist Maeve Clancy and directed by Marc Mac Lochlainn. The children really enjoyed this performance, joining in singing, clapping to the rhymes and wriggle dancing in their seats!

This year, we undertook a whole-school project to bring our pupil artistic talents outside.  The goal was to enhance our outdoor space with impactful art- one which promotes our schools values, our vision and raise a smile!

We are proud of our school and all it represents and we wanted to communicate, through art, everything that’s positive and important to our school. Using our name GORT SCEICHE,  we picked a theme for each letter. Every class designed the artwork representing the theme as follows for each letter:

G – Animals in our Environment

O – Friendship

R – Learning at school

T – Religion

S – Place Names

C – Our School 

E – GAA

I – Music

C – Sport 

H – Digital/IT

E – Music

Here are some photos of our pupils designing & creating their art earlier this year:

A special thank you to Melissa Walsh, MW Design, Print & Signs for making the letters and adding our pupil’s art to each letter. Her enthusiasm and creativity brought this project from 70 A4 sheets of themed artwork to what’s now proudly displayed on our school wall.

The finished letters –

We are so happy with the finished art!  Thank you to our amazingly talented pupils at Gortskehy who have brought this art to life with their creativity and artistic flair. We hope it makes you smile!