Parent and Child Classes

Here are some pictures of our parent and child classes which ran twice a week from November to June. Some Junior Infant children and their parents worked with me learning lots of new words in English, doing nursery rhymes, maths activities, working on their Jolly Phonics sounds and letter formation. The children also read lots of books in our sessions and at home with Mam and Dad.

Thank you Solvita, Kristers, Vera, Ralfs,  Zigurds, Monika, Oliwer and Michael! You made every session a pleasure and I am so happy with how much the children have learned this year.

First Class Poetry

Today Ms Carrig, Mrs Quinn and I finished our six weeks working with the first class children from Ms Dennis' class for Literacy Power Hour. I  focussed on the Oral Language Curricular objectives for poetry enabling the children to:

• Listen to, read, learn and recite a varied and appropriate repertoire of rhymes and poems
• Listen to and say nonsense words and unusual words
• Listen to, read, learn and recite more sophisticated nonsense verse and rhymes

I read a selection of poems to each group and the children selected the ones they liked and glued them into their personal poetry anthologies. Then they they learned a new poem or a section of a poem each night. Those who liked a challenge went for the bronze, silver and gold awards. These are for challenging poems which require sustained effort over a number of nights to learn. Please Mrs Butler is a favourite for bronze, The Ning Nang Nong for silver and The ABC poem for gold.

Many thanks to all the parents who supported us by working on the poems and reading every night.

Here are some pictures of the children holding up the poems they are most proud of learning.

Fingal Athletics Finals

St Catherine's Running Team competed in our final races of the season on Tuesday 21st May. The Fingal Schools Finals were part of Africa Week Atheltics at Morton Stadium in Santry. All of the children ran well, some achieving their own personal goals of completing the course and others bringing home silver and gold. As always, I was so proud of how the children behaved during all of the races this year, how the encouraged each other and how they showed their grit and courage through some very tough racing conditions.

'Sport does not build character, it reveals it.'  Haywood Hale Broun

We were lucky enough to meet the guest of honour, Wilfred Bungei from Kenya, the 800m gold medal winner from the Beijing 2008 Olympic games

A special thanks to all the parents who came with us to all the races this year. We could not have done any of it without your support.