We had great fun in the middle room today celebrating Pancake Tuesday. We enjoyed decorating our pancakes with Nutella and jellies! We are all ready for Lent now!

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!

On Friday, March 29th 2019 the children in first, second and third class went on a very exciting trip to the McHale factory in Ballinrobe.

When we arrived we were met by our tour guide and we were all very excited. We went to the board room and we got to look at a video about the history of the company. It was very interesting! After that we had a tour of the showroom and we learned all about the balers and different machines. We have done lots of work on inventions and science this year and it was great to see real inventions and how they are made in real-life. We learned that different materials and pieces are put together to make the machinery. They even use robotic machines to make the balers!

When we came home we typed a story about our trip on our Chromebooks.

We were very lucky to have the fantastic opportunity to see real-life inventions. We had a magical, fun-filled memorable day!

The Creative Schools programme  aims to put the arts and creativity at the heart of children and young people’s lives.

It gives children and young people a central role in the process.   Back in June 2018,  we were selected as one of 150 schools nationally to take part in this pilot initiative which will help us understand, develop and celebrate the arts and creativity in our school.

We have been assigned a Creative Associate, Jojo Hynes, who will support our school to develop a Creative School Plan for the year ahead. Jojo will assist in creating and developing links between schools and artists/ art and cultural organisations at local and national level along with challenging us to think in new and different ways.

Meet our Creative Schools Team – a representative group who will lead the Creative School process here at Gortskehy.

We are looking forward to working with the Arts Council and Jojo on this exciting initiative this year.

Thank you to all our pupils who entered the Credit Union Art Competition this year and to the class teachers for helping them with their creativity.   As usual, the standard was very high and we were delighted that a number of our pupils were recognised for their wonderful art & talent.

The winners in each category from our school were as follows:

7 years & under – 1st: Alaois Doherty, 2nd: Ciara Hession, 3rd: Caitlín Ryan

8-10 years – 1st: Fiona Ryan, 2nd: Ella McManus, 3rd: Dayna Jordan

11-13 years – 1st: Kellyann Walsh, 2nd: Aoife Heaney, 3rd: Josh Wilkins

Parents were invited to a presentation ceremony on Saturday, November 10th, at the Town Hall Claremorris.

Well done to all involved!