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.

Derek Landy author visit

Here are some pictures of our visit from Derek Landy, author of the Skullduggary Pleasant Series.

Start of Cross-Country Season

Our cross-country season began with the Brother/Clonliffe Schools Meet in Santry Demense on Wednesday 10th October. In October,  5^th and 6^th class were working on the Athletics Strand of the PE curriculum. One of the objectives is to develop in the children ‘an understanding of the rules of athletics and apply them in suitable competitive settings’. To this end,  all of the children from 5th and 6th took part in trials to select 20 boys and 20 girls to enter as competitors. The rest of the children came as supporters to experience this exciting event. There was a field of over 150 in both the boys and girls 1,000 m races. All of our athletes did us proud with our fastest boys and girls holding their own in the top 30 against the elite athletes from the top Dublin running clubs. For many of our athletes it was their very first competitive race and we were very proud of them for completing the course. Thanks to Ms Deery, Ms O'Neill and Mr Dunne for all of the organisation that went into this. Well done to all our athletes!

 Our girls' captain Rapha sprinting out at the start.

 Boys' captain Ciarán cruises home.