The highlights from this week were Forest School and preparing for our assembly!

In Forest School we did a range of activities. We found our ‘sit spot’ and had 5 minutes sitting in silence listening to the sounds around us. We used lots of the tools again and drilled holes in the conkers. Some of us made necklaces and others made decorations for our special tree. We also got to use the big saw and cut through large pieces of bark to make a flat piece for our floats. We also made signs and posters for our dens and formed tribes, to protect our dens! We had lunch and hot chocolate, as always, and wrote in our diaries. We are looking forward to next week already!

In maths we have been looking at ‘Lines and Angles’ and can identify parallel lines, horizontal and vertical lines. We can also identify right angles and straight angles.

In English and Core Curriculum we were reading and writing about famous black people in history who have achieved great things. We will have told the school all about this in our assembly today, Friday. We look forward to showing you some pictures of our assembly and art work next week.

Our kindness monitors have been catching people being kind and also we have been looking out for our secret person all week.

It was Mental Health Week also this week in school and we celebrated by doing extra mindfulness everyday focusing on positive affirmations. We also made posters to put up with positive affirmations that we say to ourselves to help us feel better. Examples are: I am kind, I am intelligent, I am strong, I am brave. We also focused on sending kindness to others that we  find it hard to get along with. We sent them wishes like: May you be happy, May you be healthy, May your life be filled with joy. We found this hard at first but it is helping  us to change our mood when dealing with

This week we finished learning about lines and angles in maths. We also started subtraction. We also drew our  names on a piece of paper and stuck them on the door. We did a collaborative artwork activity where we made ‘Frankenstein Monsters’. Everyone drew the head of the monster, folded the paper and passed the drawing on. Then we did the same for the torso and legs. At the end we had 30 very unique creations! Ms. Delaney thought we were so creative and we had a lot of fun.

This week was Mental Health Week so we did positive affirmations and completed a gratitude journal every day. We did a drama of ‘An Timpiste’. We learned about Black History month which is the month of October. We learned about some notable Black Irish people. We are doing a very important engineering project and we have been doing a very fun Viking project.

By Nina and Beau

Last Friday after we sent our newsletter we did still images and thought tracking in drama. A still image is where you pick a moment in time (often as another character) and freeze in the position of that moment. Our classmates then try to guess the moment and guess who each character is. Thought tracking is where you say what your character would be thinking in that moment. We had read about Katie Taylor in our ‘Girls Play Too’ book so we did our still images on her Olympic final win in 2012.

Over the week we have been working on Number Theory in maths. In P.E we practiced one-handed catches and we played a big game of rounders, which was really fun. It was Mental Health Awareness week here in RMDS so we completed our usual mindfulness in class but we also had mindfulness for homework. Each night we tried out a different mindful activity. We have a whole school assembly on Friday which we learned the call and response song ‘Che Che Kule’ for.

On Wednesday members of An Garda Síochána came to speak to us about safety at Halloween and they gave us high visibility bags and arm bands. They answered loads of questions for us and we are excited for them to come back soon. After the Gardaí left on Wednesday we pushed back all the tables and chairs and played drama games. We played ‘Heads down, thumbs up’ and ‘Blink Detective’. We also played drama games on Thursday morning before putting our tables back to normal. Lastly in art this week we made spooky haunted houses using paint. You can see some examples of these in the pictures below. We had another great week in Rang a Cúig! Thank you for reading!

We have had a very interesting week in Rang a Sé. We have been reading ‘The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’ for the last couple of weeks and are a good bit of the way through. Last Friday we had art and we did 3D drawings. On Monday we started doing long division in maths.  It is a hard topic but we are doing well. We are doing WWI projects in school and will present them today and tomorrow. We are also making ‘Reel-life’ science videos to enter into a competition. On Wednesday we practiced our geography and atlas skills with a challenging crossword. On Thursday we had PE where we worked on our throwing and catching skills and played rounders. It was great fun!

By Milo and Jack