We have recently set up a paired reading system in Nun’s Cross. Each week children from the older classes will meet with their reading buddy from a younger class and both children will have the opportunity to read with their buddy. The children from 5th and 6th paired up with the junior and senior infants today and enjoyed some reading time in the sun! We look forward to more reading time with our friends!
Active week 2019
Hoping the weather for next week will be as good as promised to make our active week 2019 even more enjoyable.
Under the sea in Junior Infants
This week in Junior infants we were working on the ‘under the sea’ theme. We have been so busy.
During aistear, our big project has been building a submarine. It has taken lots of team work and patience all week and there are still lots of finishing touches to add to our structure. We made lots of fish to decorate the submarine.
We enjoyed our water play earlier in the week, where we studied capacity and floating and sinking. We also explored waterproof materials, where we looked at the different professions and the clothes they may wear.
In science we have been working with magnets. We explored our classroom to find magnetic items. We also learned how magnets are used in metal detectors and in waste management. Today we designed and made a fishing game using magnets, straws, string, paper clips and paper. We had lots of fun catching fish.
Ashford Fair 2019
Today at the Ashford fair the ‘Nuns Cross Carnival’ was a hive of activity. A variety of fun games and activities welcomed young and old to our tent. Take a look inside:
Cá bhfuil….?
5th and 6th class took their Irish lesson outside today to learn the compass points as Gaeilge. We each drew a compass in the yard with chalk and played a variety of games involving running, skipping, hopping etc to the different compass points!
Microsoft Dreamspace Trip
5th and 6th class had a very exciting trip to the Microsoft offices today and got to take part in the Dreamspace programme. Read all about their day!
We were greeted like royalty when we arrived with our name on the huge screen in the entrance hall. We got a tour of the ground floor of the building. The people who work there have five restaurants, a hairdressers, a yoga room and a gym with four personal instructors! They even have a fridge beside their offices that they can help themselves to all day long. No one in Microsoft has their own desk, they just use which ever desk is free and they always work as a team. I like the way that no one is ever on their own.
Following the tour of the main floor we began our Dreamspace experience.
We had a demonstration for our guide, Ben, and he explained some things to us about artificial intelligence and clever ways that technology is used in today’s world to help improve and make peoples lives easier. We saw how AI can help people who have vision or hearing impairments and we had a chance to think about how technology could possible help us in the future. We had a hands on session where we got to explore some features of the Microsoft coding program and really enjoy exploring the endless possibilities of the program.
We had great fun, but it wasn’t over yet. We got treated to a yummy lunch and got a goodie bag each before we left. It really was a fantastic day out and we want to send a huge thank you to Microsoft for treating us so well!
Get your copy of Nun’s Cross Tales
Nun’s Cross Tales is a book of short stories, poems and musings by the children of Nun’s Cross National School. We are so proud of the work the children have done. The books are flying off the shelves in the office and our wonderful PTA have already had to re-stock. There is a limited print run on these so get your hands on a copy, you will need to drop 10 euro in to Sandra in the office. If children are bringing money in, please ensure it is secured in an envelope with the child’s name clearly indicated on the outside.
Yard painting teaser
Take a look at the transformation our yard is currently undergoing! This wonderful burst of colour on our yard is thanks to the money we raised in our Race to Galway during active week last year. We would like to say a huge well done to the children and also to their families and friends whose sponsorship is making this possible.
This is just a snippet of what’s in store for when we get back after Easter. Such an exciting time at Nun’s Cross NS.
Switzerland project displays
3rd and 4th class have been working hard learning all about Switzerland over the last few weeks. The class put on a great display of all sorts of interesting information on Switzerland. Each group covered a different topic and the whole school got the pleasure of visiting to see their work.
Happy Easter
We have had a fantastic day in Nun’s Cross celebrating the Easter holidays with an amazing Easter egg hunt thanks to the PTA and by creating lots of beautiful and bright Easter art. We hope you all enjoy the break!
Easter poems by 5th and 6th class
5th and 6th class have been working on Limerick poems this week and have created some very clever limerick poems on the theme of Easter.
Nun’s Cross are going plastic free
Exciting news – Nun’s Cross is going plastic free and to tell you more we have Elsa and Noah from our Green Schools Committee:
Nun’s Cross has decided to become a plastic free school because it is better for the environment. 5th and 6th class went on beach clean recently and we collected a disgusting amount of plastic. We were horrified at the large amount of waste on our local beach and thought if the school went plastic free it would help our environment.
To become a plastic free school, we have 3 asks:
We ask that all children have reusable water bottles/drink bottles. 60 million plastic drink bottles end up in landfill everyday around the world. Using reusable bottles will dramatically improve this.
No plastic in lunch boxes. Don’t add plastic such as cling film to items in lunch boxes, you could use bees wax paper instead!
Don’t use plastic straws! If you really have to have a straw use paper or bamboo ones instead!
We hope that by following these 3 asks, the school will have a huge reduction in plastic waste which will help the environment for all of us
Active Week is coming up!
Speaking on behalf of the Active Committee, some students would like to make an announcement:
Active Week is to help us keep our Active Flag and its loads of fun for the whole school. It promotes active fun and active learning throughout the whole school and for all ages. This year it is taking place from Monday the 13th of May to Friday the 17th of May.
This year we have a great variety of sports taking place from basketball to active stations and jersey day. We are going to be drinking alot of water because we will be sweating lots!
At the end of the week, to celebrate the active week, we will have a celebration assembly and all children are asked to bring in any sports awards that they have won as we are eager to share our achievements. We have fitted out an exciting timetable which we will be announcing after Easter.
We hope that everyone in the whole school enjoys being as active as possible and will inspire us to start news sports!
The Garden Centre
This month Senior Infants have been doing the garden centre in Aistear. Today, Junior Infants paid them a visit during aistear to see what was going on. Take a look at some of what we got up to.
Keeping ourselves Healthy
The children in 5th and 6th class have been learning about different ways to keep ourselves healthy and have been focusing on the food we eat and the impact it has on our bodies. We were so lucky to have an amazing expert, Majia O’Reilly, come into our class and fill us with loads of interesting information, guidance and tips on what we should be eating in order to be as healthy as possible.
We learned about different elements that work together to help keep us healthy and discovered how each group of food helps our bodies, in different ways, to function well. It was interesting to see how much sugar is hidden in some foods and how some simple changes we can make to our diet can have a massive impact on our health.
Just like Skittles, (but without the sugar of course!) we should aim to eat the rainbow everyday through a variety of fruits and vegetables
We had a good look at our partitioning of our food groups and saw how important it is to have fruit and veg taking up the largest portion. We are going to try and make sure to have a variety of foods in our meals as well as paying attention to the amount of each food group we have for each meal.
Beach Clean Up!
A few weeks ago Nun’s Cross signed up with The National Spring Clean and we received some bin bags, gloves and hi-vis vests. Today 5th and 6th class, along with some of their teachers, took part in a beach clean up along a 5km stretch from Killoughter to Wicklow Town. Our aim was to help improve our environment and protect the wildlife in the area from being harmed by litter making its way into their habitats.
Our access to the beach ended up being off road so we warmed our legs up with a nice long walk before beginning our task.
We set ourselves up into groups and we set off along the beach equipped with litter pickers, bin bags and tally charts to catalogue all the litter we collected.
We worked hard and unfortunately we found lots of things to be collected – mainly plastics, which are not biodegradable and can have devastating effects on sea life! We collected as much as we could, although some of our bags got full and others gave way to the heavy load!
We left a huge pile of rubbish for the County Council to collect, but this is all rubbish that will not end up in the sea or in the mouths of wildlife!
The owners at The Brass Fox very kindly allowed us to use their toilets and wash our hands before we had a picnic lunch on the green outside their premises. And they went one step further and treated all the children to hot chocolate to reward them for their efforts. We all agreed that is was the nicest hot chocolate we have ever had! Huge thanks to the Brass Fox for ending our day on such a positive note, a whole community working together to make our planet cleaner for all!
After our litter pick, and using our tally sheets, we categorised everything we collected into a variety of material types and then analysed our results.
Our most common material, by far, was plastic. We found some odd materials too like spray paint cans, barbecue grills and a large door hinge. We found that all of our waste was collected on the Killoughter end of the beach, with very little waste being found towards the Murrough end of the stretch. We concluded that this is likely to be because, even though the Wicklow end of the beach has much heavier people traffic, it also has more people looking after it through the likes of The Tidy Towns Committee and kind hearted local residents and has bins for people to dispose of their rubbish. We also spoke about how litter can travel down the length of the beach and would have much less of a chance of being collected and disposed of correctly due to the lack of people that far down the beach and lack of bins for litter to be disposed of correctly.
We are delighted to see all that we collected and think about how we have helped to prevent it ending up in the oceans and harming wildlife
The Clothes Shop in Junior Infants
This week in Juniors we have been working on the clothes shop. We got lots of practice being customers and shopkeepers. We got to try on lots of new clothes. Take a look at some of our favourite items from the new spring/summer collection…
Outfits complete with accessories. We had some really happy girls this week. Meanwhile, with the boys….
Not only were we great at clothes shopping, we also tried our look at designing clothes for ourselves. We used a variety of textiles and fabrics to create some wonderful ensembles.
In English, we read the story of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ which gave us a great laugh. We had a class debate about school uniforms. Should we have uniforms in school? Would it not be better to have uniforms? The children argued tooth and nail and came to a decision that ……………
In SESE we looked at clothes from around the world and compared them to the clothes we wear. We discussed our ideas on why people in different countries dress the way they do.
We followed this up by studying the properties and characteristics of materials in science and we designed clothes for teddy to wear in hot weather, cold weather and in wet weather.
We looked at the clothes people wore in Ireland way back in history and the clothes we wear today. We noticed a huge difference. We prefer the clothes we wear now because they are cooler and much more colourful and interesting.
Friday treat in Junior Infants
This week in Junior Infants we decided to treat ourselves with hot chocolate and popcorn after a very productive week of work. Thankfully we had a few students who knew how to make our treats.
River studies by 5th and 6th class
5th and 6th class have been studying the topic of rivers this month.
We have linked it in literacy to our class novel, ‘Journey To The River Sea’ by Eva Ibbotson which we have thoroughly enjoyed.
We created 3D models of a river profile in art, and although they took a long time (and a bit more patience) they have turned out really well! We started with a simple piece of cardboard. We used scrunched up pieces of newspaper to create the structure and secured it to the card with masking tape. We covered the structure with newspaper soaked in PVA glue and finally covered the model with white paper. When it was dry we painted it and we labelled all the various parts of the river on our profiles.
In Geography we have been learning about the stages of a river, the features of a river and how they are formed and the journey of a river. The children were set the task of completing a river project for the end of our topic and they all presented fabulously researched and presented projects. They included information on rivers, river features, uses of rivers, river life, river pollution and more. Each child also completed a case study on a river of their choice.
The children learned so much from each other about rivers as they each had the chance to present their work to their peers. We also took advantage of the sunny weather and took our classroom outside to put on a project display for the rest of the school and all the parents.
Biodiversity talk by Tom Gallagher
The children in Nun’s Cross had a real treat this week with a visit from Tom Gallagher who is an expert in all things biodiversity, with a special interest in birds and plants. He told us lots of interesting facts about the plants and animals living in our school garden and in our local area and we picked up loads of tips on how we can help support biodiversity in school and at home.
Did you know:
The sound of the Hummingbird Moth can only be heard by women!
The swift bird fly’s non-stop for three whole years, never landing once. It eats, sleeps and drinks while flying!
In one fistful of soil, there is up to 10,000,000,000,000 micro creatures which are responsible for all things that grow!
A dragon fly has 1,500 lenses in each eye. It can see 360 degrees, can fly forwards and backwards and hover!
Woodpeckers have not lived in Ireland for many years but have recently returned and are now living in Wicklow!
A huge thanks to Tom for coming in and sharing some of his knowledge with us!
