@BioDataCentre  @GreenSchoolsIre

Today we celebrate World Bee Day – 20th May 2019 

Did You Know?

• Irish Bumblebee populations are in decline.
• One third of our 99 bee species are threatened with extinction from Ireland. This is because we have drastically reduced the amount of food (flowers) and safe nesting sites in our landscapes.
• In response this decline and threat of extinction, the National Biodiversity Data Centre coordinated the implementation of the an All Ireland Pollinator Plan( 2015-2020) along with 68 other government and non-government organisations as partners to support the plan.

The All-Ireland Pollinator Plan is about all of us, from farmers to local authorities, to schools, gardeners and businesses, coming together to try to create an Ireland where pollinators can survive and thrive.  Here at Gortskehy, we are committed to playing our part and making our school bee-friendly.

The middle room studied the Junior Pollinator Plan with their teacher, Ms. Thomas. They learnt all about bees and their important role as pollinators.  They also learnt about the life cycle of the bumble bee & what we can do to help our bees survive and thrive.

  

Our school Pollinator & Green School Teams drew maps of the current school grounds.  This was done to identify areas where we can take action to help pollinators. Lots of good ideas that we hope to put into action were noted by our pupils on the walkabout:

• Plant bee-friendly plants in our garden beds.
• Leave narrow strips around our pitch for wildflowers
• Mow our lawn/pitch less frequently – to allow dandelions and clover to grow – food sources for our bees.
• Reduce pesticides – only use it for clearing slippery areas/paths.  Only weed by hand.
• Plant a herb bed – they are an excellent source of food for pollinators.

These maps will be updated to include all the pollinator areas we will develop around our school.  We will monitor and report on bee activity and update our plans annually.

Here are some photos of our pupils planting bee-friendly plants, flowers and herbs in our new Sensory & Biodiversity garden.

   

    

 

 

For more information on what you can do to help the bees – please visit http://pollinators.ie/

@creativeirl @artscouncil_ie  @mus_gen

We were delighted to welcome Zane Kazotniece-Joyce,  a tutor/facilitator working with Music Generation, to our school.  Zane provided a number of workshops on Recycled Music/Wild About Music to pupils in the Junior and Middle rooms.

Within these workshops, the pupils were actively involved in making musical instruments from recycled materials.  They explored sound and rhythms with different musical instruments and natural materials.

As you will see from the photos below, the pupils thoroughly enjoyed these workshops.  Thank you Zane!

We have been very busy here in first, second and third class in Gortskehy with Science and Engineering lately.

We sowed seeds in the classroom. First class sowed cress, second class sowed runner beans and third class sowed baby carrots. We are having great fun watching these grow.

We completed a project on The Leaning Tower of Pisa and we learned lots of interesting facts. We learned that it is a Romanesque building, and that poor foundations caused it to lean. It was designed by engineers. It is a huge tourist attraction and over 1 million people visit it every year. We used our Chromebooks to create a slide show in pairs. We cast our projects to the board and we enjoyed looking at each others work. We created our own version of the Leaning Tower of Pisa in art class using match sticks and cotton buds.

We have some big Manchester United supporters here in Gortskehy! We recently looked into the Munich Air Crash for history. It  was a terrible event for Man United. We worked as journalists and wrote newspaper articles about the tragedy. We wrote about the slippery runway and how the aircraft had difficulty taking off, resulting in the accident. We learned that Sir Bobby Charlton survived the accident and played many more matches for Man United. We worked in groups and created a presentation on our Chromebooks and we shared it on the board. Finally, we put our engineering hats on and created models of the aircraft using recycled materials and our imaginations!

During Engineers Week (March 2nd-8th 2019), we put our engineering hats on again! We used our imagination and our knowledge of the world and how things are made to create 3-D drawings. We had to think practically and use our problem solving skills to create these structures. We made everything from baby play gyms, to playgrounds, to underground drills, to water-parks, and lots more wonderful things.

We really enjoyed our recent work as engineers in the middle room. It allowed us to develop our creativity and problem solving skills. We had to share our ideas and work together as a team to come up with our amazing creations. We really enjoyed using the Chromebooks to create our projects and loved incorporating technology into our learning.

Who knows, we may have the next budding engineer in our midst here in Gortskehy – Watch this space!

A snapshot of rang 1-3 at work

“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!

As part of our @ActiveFlag initiative we have introduced playground leaders to our yard at break time.

Children from the senior room are taking turns and working as the leaders and play games with each of the younger classes. The leaders had a meeting and they came up with the games and rota.

The children are really enjoying playing yard games such as tag, chocolate chip cookie, stuck in the mud, relays etc. It gives each child an opportunity to get involved in a game and helps to keep break times active and fun!

Third Class (2018/19)

(F) Ben, Isabel, Seán, James, Katie (B) Gabriel, Molly, Shane, Ryan, Alyssa, Corbijn

Well done to everyone who kindly contributed to the Team Hope Shoebox Appeal. Such a kind and generous act, this will bring so much joy to the children who open their special delivery from the boys and girls of Gortskehy this Christmas. This appeal is such a worthy cause as Team Hope give your Christmas Shoebox gifts right into the hands of some of the world’s most vulnerable children – many of whom will receive no other gift this Christmas. For some it’s the first gift they’ve ever received. Thanks also to Veronica for distributing the pamphlets and collecting the shoeboxes from our school.

“It’s not how much we give but how much love we put into giving” Mother Teresa

We had a great week celebrating Maths Week in first, second and third class. We played maths games everyday at school. We learned lots of new games!

We went outside on Thursday to explore maths in the world around us. We worked in teams and completed a maths trail. The maths trail helped us to explore shapes, lines, numbers and length.

We had great fun!

Enjoying Maths Week!

Here in Gortskehy N.S., we are delighted to announce our involvement with the Digital Schools Excellence programme. We are part of a three school cluster which includes St. Pats BNS, Castlebar and Meelickmore N.S.. We made an application to be involved in this project to the Department of Education and Skills last year and were successful. We will be working as a team over the next 3 years to enhance our teaching and your children’s learning using digital technologies. Each family will receive a copy of our first newsletter below. We are in the process of developing our own website where you will be able to view our ongoing progress throughout the year.