As part of the Children's book festival, we were delighted to be invited to an audience with author, Serena Molloy at Dunmore Library.  

The children enjoyed listening to Serena reading an extract from her book, Wider than the Sea, and engaged in an activity where the children composed poetry using words from a text. 

Congratulations to 6th class on graduating Primary School.

Best wishes in the years to come 🎓

6th Class have been planning and running training sessions for 4th, 5th and 6th Class for the past few weeks. 

They've worked on speed, agility and ball control and helped to develop players' soccer skills. 

We're really looking forward to our in school blitz in June! 

Today, 6th Class planted beautiful Native Irish Trees in the school grounds.  The trees were donated to the school by the local Tidy Towns Committee.

We had great fun planning where to plant our trees, ensuring the trees were sufficiently spaced from each other and of course digging the holes!

We look forward to monitoring the trees' growth and hope that 6th Class will come back in years to come to see how well their tree is doing 🌳

Thank you to the parents for sending in spades and shovels.  It was quite the sight to see as the children marched in with spades under their arms, ready for work 😃

Click the link below to watch our short video 🎥

🏉 Rugby Blitz Castlebar 🏉

6th Class boys were invited to take part in a blitz in Castlebar on Thursday 6th April. 

The boys took charge of their own warm up, stretching and doing some passing before the games started. 

As the games progressed it was clear to see that the boys were the ones to beat in the group - their passing and defence were strong and they scored some impressive tries! 

Several of the organisers from Connacht Rugby commented on their skill and encouraged the to join the local club. 

Thanks to Niall for all of his work on school with us during the term. We've really enjoyed the rugby sessions each week. 

Thanks to Ger Kelly also for coming with us today and acting as our coach for the day. 

Thanks to Dunmore RFC from all at Dunmore NS For

such a fun, well organized day!!   

We had a great day and look forward to the next event.

📚 Literacy 📚

In December we looked at different types of Winter poems. We read the poem Great Winter and discussed the imagery created in the poem. After that, we studied Acrostic Poems and Haikus. We created our own Winter and Christmas inspired poems.

☕  Hot Chocolate:  ❄

As an end of term treat, we made hot chocolate in the classroom.

We used a slow cooker to heat the milk and then stirred in the powder. When it was served, we had the choice of adding cream and marshmallows! It was a welcome treat after a cold yard break! ☕❄

Unfortunately, it was all gone before we thought to take any photos! 🙂

✍🏼 Study Skills 📓

We started to develop some revision skills ahead of our end of year tests in SESE and Maths. We started by going through the Chapters and determining the most important information in each Chapter.  We then condensed the information into study notes and brought them home to revise.  The tests results reflected our hard work – it turns out revision works! 🙂

💡Science 🔦

In science this month, we learned about light. We discussed lots of different sources of light and interesting facts about light.

Our main focus was on reflection. We used mirrors, prisms and torches to bounce light off different surfaces before making periscopes. These are the instructions we used:

Rugby & PE 🏉🏃🏽‍♀️

We started Rugby Training at the end of November. We focused mainly on passing skills and remembering to only pass the ball backwards. After a few sessions, we have mastered these skills and started to work more on defence and a few short games.

We’re looking forward to learning more skills in the New Year and building up some game time.

In PE this month, we focused on Athletics. We practised the areas of running, jumping and throwing.

We did a lot of different sprints and some reaction sprints as well as some shot putt & javelin throws. We eventually got down Cannons to run a circular relay in teams. Passing the baton took a bit of practice but we got there in the end!

🎄 Christmas Raffle 2021 🎄

This year, 6^th Class were given the task of writing the raffle tickets and counting the money for the raffle. We had to make sure that everyone got the correct number of tickets each day. We also had to ensure that the money was counted and bagged correctly. the amount counted also had to match the amount collected each day.

It was a huge responsibility but we learned many new skills!

🏆Draughts Tournament 2021🏆

After several excellent games throughout three rounds, we held our final game today. It was a close match with very strategic play. They had the audience captivated!

Congratulations to our Draughts Tournament Winners

🥇1st Place: Mark Walsh

🥈James Hanly

🥉Callum Walsh

Runner Up: Odhrán Healy

Draughts Tournament 

We started our Draughts Tournament today in school. We started by preparing our Tournament Wall Chart and drawing names. 

Once we had the classroom set up, it was time to play!

This time next week we will have crowned our Draughts Champion 🏆

Our 6th Class Hoodies arrived today! We chose a black hoodie with gold writing.

October Blog

October was a busy month….have a look at some of our highlights!

In October, we did lots of fun things like chess, art, no uniform day etc. I actually can’t remember what art we did except the mod rock masks. So the masks were made from mod rock. We put one layer of mod rock on a balloon and then waited 1-2 weeks for it to dry, then we put another layer on. My one fell apart, so I got a prebuilt mask. After the mod rock dries you put newspapers on it to make eyes, nose and a mouth. Then you add one more layer of mod rock and wait for it to dry again. Once that dries you paint the mod rock whatever colour you want and then you’re finished.

Mirran Saman

During October, there were mod rock masks that we made. They were kind of hard to make. We had to put them on a balloon. These are the things that you will need to make it- a balloon, bowl of water mod rock plasters (obviously).

Jamie Quinn

In the days counting down to Halloween break, we learned about the history of Halloween. Halloween was also known as All Hallow’s Eve or All Saints Day. It was said that the dead walked the streets on this day. People lit bon fires to try scaring the spirits away. Later on in the years, people became less frightened of the dead. Children began to play tricks on their neighbours and wore masks to disguise themselves so neighbours would exchange treats instead of tricks and that is how trick or treating evolved.

Ella Dowling

We also did ‘Run Around Ireland’. We had to just run or walk around down the Cannon’s to the place that the teacher picked. One lap around the Cannons was counted as one km. Also, we did one lesson of football with a coach from Galway GAA.

Emilia Drozda

We did a Maths trail where you had a partner and you ran around the outside of the school. There were two letters that had a number on a metal pate, we went and found the letters and added the two numbers together. Whoever answers all the questions correctly wins.

We started football training at school as well with a real Galway trainer.

We played hockey on the tarmac for PE.

We started a thing called Run Around Ireland, it's where you go to certain places around Ireland and 1 lap of the field equals 1 kilometre, so far we went to Benbulben and the Aran Islands!

​Callum Walsh

We did a Maths trail where you partner up with someone, run around the school to find plates that are on the walls and collect letters from them. Each letter represents numbers and you have to write them down on a sheet. You either have to add, subtract, multiply or divide the numbers. One person runs around collecting letters and one person writes them down. Do the sum and go to teacher, then you are done.

James Glynn

In October we did a few things like chess, football and some art. One of the first things we learnt was chess and draughts. We were allowed to play draughts after we finished are work with people on are table. Some of us learnt how to play chess. The aim of the game is to get your opponents king when you get their king you say ‘checkmate’ and then take the king.

A few weeks later, we did football. A coach came to the school and told us how to play football. We started the training session by doing hand passing and after that we did dribbling. You have to hop or solo the ball every four steps. After we did the dribbling, we did kick passing and finally we played a match. There was three teams and there was around 2-3 minutes per game.

Odhrán Healy

Happy Halloween! 🎃🦇👻

Have a look at the masks we made. 

We used plaster strips to make the mold. Some of us added facial features before we all painted our chosen designs onto our masks. 

Football Coaching

6th class started football training with Jack Hynes from Galway GAA. 

The training runs for 5 weeks and involves skill development and games. 

The weather wasn't on our side today, but we made the most of it! 

We've started playing Draughts in 6th Class this month. Hopefully, with a bit of practice, we will be able to set up a class tournament in the coming weeks 🤞🏽

So far this term we are working on the Games strand of  PE. We started off with some basketball and soccer and have now moved on to Hockey! 🏑

September 2021

Have a look at what we've been up to during the month of September.

One of the first fun things we did was learning about this person called ‘Banksy’. He is an anonymous artist who is known for his street art. We learned that he had a very good painting but he put a shredder in the frame of the art. It was called ‘Girl with a balloon’. It was sold for €1 million and as soon as the hammer hit the wood, it shredded itself.

Odhrán Healy

Kandinsky is an artist who specialised in abstract art. His art doesn’t look like too much, but each dot, line or squiggle means something. Each of his pictures tells it's own story. He even has a painting that is just circles. It was sold for millions; that tells it's own story!

Ben O'Connor

Another thing we were learning about was different types of families. I thought before, everything is fine with every family but it really isn’t. Last year I lost my brother and I learned how precious your family is.
I also learned how hard life is for other families, like how some are living on a mountain in tents. Honestly, I don’t know how lucky I am to have an easy life. We did this game about two weeks ago where we guessed where families live.
You think you know so much about everyone, but you don’t realise how hard it is for some families. That’s all I have to say about families, but one more thing: Feel lucky for how much you have.

Luca Herviaux

The Novel we are reading is called Can You See Me? I love seeing what life is like for a girl with Autism. It explains how people see her, what she feels about things and what helps her.
Apphia Murphy Biggins

I found abstract painting interesting. You had to draw your own creative drawing. I had what looked like a space portal and coloured the background in black and dotted white dots around it. One of my favourite paintings was the oil pastels. It was so satisfying. It was the sun setting and it’s reflection bouncing off the water.
Josh Farnham

For Irish, sometimes we would play Irish ‘Guess Who’. Basically you just play Guess Who but you use Irish words and phrases!
James Glynn

In Science we learned about different types of solids, liquids and gases. We did two fun experiments. The first experiment was watching solids mix into liquids by dissolving sugar in water. The second experiment was creating a gas by mixing vinegar, water and baking soda in a bottle and putting a balloon over the mouth of the bottle. The balloon expanded!

Ella Dowling