St. Patrick's JNS Green Schools Committee Members are ready for action!

Our new Green Schools committee members took up their duties this week. Each of the subcommittees is pictured below. No dripping tap is safe, no unnecessary light is left on, and everybody who walks, cycles, skates or car pools has their contribution to a greener school recorded. Our new committee is the biodiversity committee and they have lots of plans to increase biodiversity in our school garden. With the help of parents and the Bio-D squad children in the school will be making bug hotels and a wormery. Bugs (or minibeasts as they are also known) and worms play a very important part in increasing biodiversity. We are also hoping to collect seaweed over the next few weeks. Seaweed is full of nutrients which encourages growth in plants and we hope to use it as fertilizer for our flower beds. If you are down on the beach please collect a sandwich bag full of seaweed and bring it to Room 3 before Wednesday the 23rd of October. 

Thank you for your continued help and support. 

This year's Green Schools Committee. We have members from Senior Infants, First Class and Second Class.

This is our Water Squad. They make sure that dripping taps are found and fixed and monitor use of rainwater for art lessons.

Our Energy Squad make sure that no unnecessary electricity is used in school.

The Travel Squad checks to see how many people walk, scoot or car-pool to school every morning.

Meet our new Biodiversity Squad! They will be helping to make a wormery and bug hotel.

Junior Infants Coffee Morning

The Parents' Association would like to welcome all Junior Infant parents to a coffee morning in the Halla at 9.30 a.m. on Friday morning the 6th of September. This is a great opportunity to meet the parents of the other children in your child's class and we hope to see you all there.

Fáilte Arais!

Welcome back to all our pupils, and a very warm welcome to our new Junior Infants who looked very smart in their new school uniforms on their first day of "Big School".

Art Exhibition!

Here is a selection of beautiful art work created by pupils of the school over the last year. If you want to see more, visit our upcoming Art Exhibition which is on in the halla from Wednesday the 8th of May until Wednesday the 15th of May. 

Successful Science Week

Science week was a great success, with First classes organising displaying a range of experiments. Infant and Second classes visited the halla and First class children demonstrated the experiments for them and explained how they worked. 

The experiments displayed included a musical instrument made from glass bottles filled with water, mirror writing, butter making (the butter was delicious!!), floating and sinking experiments, lava lamps, moving patterns made from dish-washing liquid and food colouring floating on a sea of milk, the rubber egg (a demonstration of how important calcium is for our bones), the dangers of fizzy drinks to our teeth, how root vegetables grow and rocket launching for beginners. 

Watch the short video above to see one of our successful rocket launches. Well done to all who participated and especially to the First classes and their teachers who organised everything!

I Can't Believe It Is Real Butter!

We poured some double cream into a very very clean jam jar and closed the lid tightly. Then we shook and shook and shook some more.... all the tiny bits of fat stuck together into bigger and bigger lumps until we had one big lump of butter in the middle of the jar. We spread the butter on cream crackers and everyone had a taste. Yum yum!!

Green School

St. Patrick's Junior School along with other students all over Ireland will be celebrating Biodiversity week in May. We will also be having our annual beach clean up so we need all the help we can get.

We are very proud of all our students who save energy, save water and walk, scoot and cycle to school. Well Done!

We have four green flags and we are currently in the process of getting our fifth flag for Biodiversity.

We would like to thank Michael our caretaker and all the parents who have helped in our garden and especially Cate Monaghan. We have a range of plants, herbs and vegetables around our school and soon enough we will have a bug hotel and wormery.

As part of our biodiversity flag we will be having chicks in our school so the children can learn about their life cycle. We are very excited.

Our new green school Committee for Biodiversity are called the “Bio- D’s”.

                                      Go Bio-Ds!!!!!