October was a busy month in 3rd and 4th class. We began the month immersing ourselves in a STEM project based on rivers. We studied the journey of a river, to discover it has three parts. It has an upper, middle and lower course. We learned all about the source, tributaries, and mouth of a river. We learned about the River Shannon in Ireland and the amazing Amazon River in South America. We even created our very own model of a river. We used sand, stones, tin foil, food colouring and water to create it. We placed sand and stones at the edges of a tray, and ran the tin foil in a meandering way through it. We diluted water with blue food colouring in a jug and poured into onto the tinfoil. However, we discovered this wasn’t an accurate model of a river as it wasn’t flowing. We came up with a plan to punch some holes with a pencil at the ‘mouth of the river’ and it did the trick. Our model river began to flow out into the sea, imitating a real river.

We then turned our focus to building a bridge to cross the river! We put our engineering hats on and worked in groups to design a bridge that would work. The aim was to ensure our bridge designs would hold a toy car for 30 seconds. We used a variety of materials to create our bridges, One team used building blocks, another used Lego, we had another group using cardboard and recycled materials, one using lollipop sticks and sellotape and we had an edible bridge made from ‘Pringles’. We used team effort, discussion, reason and problem solving to design and create our bridges. It was an exciting experience for us and allowed us to work as an engineer for a short while!

The history of Halloween came in a timely way for us and we discovered that Halloween dates right back to the time of The Celts. We focused on our scary Halloween stories first, where the children drafted, edited and redrafted their stories. We drew illustrations to go with them and we digitally added them to our typed version. The children really enjoyed using their imaginations and the writing process.

We rounded of the month with some very enjoyable Halloween pumpkin paintings and a haunted village craft scene!

Wishing everyone a safe and happy Halloween from all of us in 3rd and 4th class!

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!

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!