On Tuesday of this week we had Safer Internet Day. Safer Internet Day is an EU initiative. It is promoted in Ireland by the Webwise Internet Safety Initiative (Professional Development Service for Teachers(PDST)).

It aims to educate and raise awareness about protecting children online, so that they can responsibly enjoy the benefits of the Internet, without compromising their safety and privacy.
Throughout this week our pupils at St.Attracta’s will be engaging in a number of Internet Safety Lessons. This follows the excellent presentations we all recently received at our whole school Internet Safety Day on Tuesday January 16th for pupils (2nd-6th), staff and parents.

We highly recommend you take some time to explore the informative family resources that can be found here.

http://www.saferinternetday.ie/parents/

www.webwise.ie/parents

We are very much looking forward to welcoming our new Junior Infant Class for 2018/19 to our school tomorrow at 2pm!

Reminder:
With this in mind and to help the organisation of this afternoon we ask that Ms. Duffy’s Junior Infants, Mrs. Reilly’s Senior Infants, Ms. Ruane’s Spraoi and Mrs. McDonagh’s Sonas Class finish at 1.45pm. from our usual collection points. We apologise in advance for any inconvenience this may cause. Thank you as always for your support.

Yesterday in school we celebrated Grandparents’ Day as part of our Catholic Schools Week programme.

The day began with Mass in St.James’ Church giving thanks for all our grandparents. The mass was prepared and led by Mr.Clarkes Fourth class who deserve great credit for their hard work and the manner in which they read and participated in the mass. Our grandparents were then invited back to school where they enjoyed treats. A very special thank you to our Parents Association for all their hard work and support with this.

Many grandparents then visited our classrooms and chatted with pupils. We heard many stories of what their school days were like, how they travelled to school, First Holy Communion Day, etc.We learned of chores they did on family farms and jobs which they worked as young adults, hobbies and interests.

Grandparents Day gave us the opportunity to meet some of our grandparents and also think about the importance of all of our grandparents and the gift they are to our lives. For some, it was a return to their alma mater and time to reminisce.

For all in St.Attracta’s NS it was a privilege to have the opportunity to acknowledge the enormous contribution grandparents make.

We sincerely thank those who took the time to visit and speak to our students and hope that all our grandparents from near and far had a lovely day!

We received fantastic news this week that three of our students from 4th Class have qualified for the National Finals of the Bebras Challenge, which will be held in Maynooth University on April 21st. Only 118 children in total have reached this final Stage from a massive 5,700 participants.

This is an outstanding achievement for Kate Buckley, Sophie Frizzell and Ethel Duffy and we are so proud of them in our school.

Bebras involves using computational and abstract thinking to solve interactive tasks online. The task was to solve 15 exciting yet difficult problems in 45 minutes. It is run in over 40 countries in the world. There were four different categories linked with age groups. Castors (8-10 Years), Benjamin (10-12 years), Cadet (12-14 years) and Junior (14-16 years). https://bebras.techweek.ie/

Well done to every single student from 4th to 6th class who took took part and who showed amazing levels of patience, concentration and ability in solving the tasks.
We wish Kate, Ethel and Sophie every success in the upcoming National Finals!!

Best wishes to Mr.Rushe’s Sixth Class tomorrow when they present their fantastic project ‘Fingerprints & Footprints… Can we identify our classmates?’ at the Primary Science Fair in Mary Immaculate College of Education in Limerick.

Our students have worked so hard preparing for this day. We are all so proud of their efforts and are certain they will enjoy their day.

A huge thank you to Ms.McDonagh and Mr.Rushe for all their interest and hard work with this project, we very much appreciate this.

Bainigí taitneamh as!

Tomorrow Tuesday we are very pleased to host Internet Safety workshops here in school: 2nd- 6th Class pupils during the school day, our staff after school and a talk on Cyber Bullying and Internet Safety for Parents at 7.30pm.

Talk for Parents Overview

In today’s technology-rich environment most of us feel woefully inadequate when it comes to knowing what our children are really experiencing when they use the internet. This is normal and to be expected. However, as parents we have a fundamental duty of care for our children, and unfortunately that means getting a grasp of the things that our children are experiencing on line.

Jeremy Pagden, the Managing Director of Schools Websites, will deliver the talk. Jeremy has been travelling all over the country delivering Internet Safety talks to both Parents and children alike. The topics covered during the session are as follows:

• Overview of the internet
• Cyber bullying
• Sexual Predators & Fake Personas
• Dealing with inappropriate content
• Reputation damage
• Types of Internet Theft
• Safety settings on your home Wifi
• Browser History
• Safe use of apps
• Social Media Issues & Challenges
• Email Scams
• Safe Searching on You Tube
• The Dark Web
• Useful Resources

We cannot stress the importance of tomorrow’s presentation and very much look forward to seeing you all on the night.

On the 21st of November, we the children of 5th class were delighted to take part in a writing workshop called “Fighting Words” in The Museum of Country Life, Castlebar. We were very excited about this workshop and were looking forward to using our creative senses. We met with the leaders who were very nice, but to enter the room, we were given our first creative task which was to come up with a password before we could be let in. This was quite fun as it could be as silly as we wanted.

To begin the session, the leaders asked us to name and discuss words and phrases to do with creative writing. Once we mentioned the key parts, together as a class we brainstormed what kind of characters we wanted, names for them, their personality, the setting and plot etc. that we would like to have in our story. We took a vote on each aspect and the key parts of the story were set. As a class we complied the start of the story together. As we did that, Joseph McCafferty was listening and used his creative talents to create a cartoon of our characters. Each child was then given individual sheets of paper to write their own middle and end to the story. It was a very enjoyable day.

When we returned to school, and in the following weeks, we continued on with the first draft of our stories as we waited for the final draft with the cartoons to arrive. We were delighted to receive our beautiful individual books of our story which had plenty of blank pages and spaces for pictures for us to fill in. It even had our own photograph which they had taken on the day, a space to write about the author and for the critics view. We got to work on re writing the final draft of our individual endings and drew pictures to match. We brought them home to read to our families and they gave us their verdict and wrote it in the critics section at the back of the book.

Ms. Henry organised that we could read our stories to the infant classes just before the Christmas holidays and we were very excited about this. The children in infants particularly enjoyed the stories as they were about getting to meet Santa Claus. They were extra exciting because Santa was coming in a few days. It was a fantastic experience from start to finish and we hope we will get the chance to do it again.