RMDS
5th November 2021
From the Principal’s Desk….
Welcome back to a new half term!
This week is Children First Awareness Week, running from 1st to 7th November 2021. Children First promotes the protection of children from abuse and neglect, by setting out what individuals and organisations need to do to keep children safe, and how to deal with concerns about a child’s safety or welfare. Society has a duty of care towards children, and everyone should be alert to the possibility that children they are in contact with may be abused or at risk of abuse or neglect. If you are concerned about a child or young person, you should contact Tusla social work department. Organisations classed as providers of relevant services under the Children First Act 2015 are required to complete a risk assessment and must have a Child Safeguarding Statement in place. More information on keeping children safe in our communities is available at gov.ie/childrenfirst
Regarding Covid-19, as always, if a child has any new onset symptoms and feels unwell or seems off-form, do not send them to school and contact your GP for advice if necessary.
In addition, do not send your child to school if they have:
Please see link below for parent-focused public health advice about COVID-19 symptoms.
Wishing you all a lovely weekend,
Rosemarie
From the Board of Management….
The Board of Management is pleased to say that the final installation of the last three digital boards took place this week meaning all mainstream classrooms have latest tech interactive screens throughout the school. Thank you for all your help with fundraising over the last number of years to make this a reality.
Thanks to the Parents Association for organising the Halloween Raffle, and to you, the parents, for all the fundraising. The final figure was a wonderful €2545. All funds raised will be used for the sensory room.
The school is making a donation of €500 to Educate Together’s One Day Together fundraiser.
Schools are still not allowed to mix classes/pods/bubbles under guidance from the Department of Education and Public Health. Therefore we have not been able to run the Extra Curricular Activities programme as of yet. However, we are exploring options to try to get the programme restarted, even on a phased basis, as soon as feasible. It is worth bearing in mind that we have been very fortunate with our case numbers so far throughout the school. We still need to remain vigilant to ensure we mitigate as much as possible in this regard.
As you know all classrooms continue to remain well ventilated throughout the school, with doors and windows open as necessary. However, due to the drop in temperatures this can mean that unfortunately it can get cold in the classrooms at times. Please ensure your child wears warm clothes and lots of layers each day to keep warm.
Voluntary Contributions are vital to the running of the school and much appreciated. If you’d like more information on VCs, please contact the office.
Finally, the Board of Management would like to thank Rachel Sirr and Oscar Carolan, outgoing Co-Chairs of the PA, and Lorraine Hackett, outgoing Secretary of the PA, for their dedication to their respective roles over the last number of years. It has been a pleasure to work with them. We wish Gráinne Fahey and Joss Moorkens, incoming Co-Chairs of the PA and Amanda Holzworth, incoming Secretary of the PA, the best of luck in the coming year and we look forward to working closely with them.
From the Executive Committee….
As you can see there are different ways as parents to get involved and contribute to the school - Patron (Exec), BOM and PA. It is a wonderful way to get to know other parents.
In the case of RMDS, the patron of the school is a limited company, the Ranelagh Multi Denominational School Association (RMDSA). The board of directors of RMDSA is called the Executive Committee. RMDSA holds an AGM in Term 1 each year and elects an Executive Committee to discharge its functions. We have 6 meetings a year.
The roles and responsibilities of a Patron of a primary school fall under three main headings:
We are looking for new members. If you have any interest or any questions, please feel free to contact me: lorrainegalvin@hotmail.com
The current members of the Executive Committee are Lorraine Grace (Chairperson), David Clerkin (Treasurer), Rachel Murray (Secretary), Andrew Howley (Premises & Facilities), Elaine Cassidy (BoM Liaison), Maria Dillon (Staff Representative) & Maeve Trehy.
The Exec are delighted to launch a simple video to explain the role of the patron, BOM and the PA for parents. This was an action following on from an ethos review. This is also available on the RMDS website. Thanks to Niamh Skelly and Rachel Murray who worked on this initiative.
THANK YOU
Sincere thanks to all members of the Executive Committee for their work over the past year. Rachel and Maeve are stepping down from the Exec so I would like to thank them both for their time, collective wisdom, and good humour over the last few years. Particular thanks to Rachel who took on the role of secretary this year and that’s not easy over Zoom!
I would also like to thank Rachel and Oscar who have stepped down as co-chairs of the PA. Huge thanks for leading all the parent led and fundraising initiatives. Best wishes to Grainne and Joss who are taking over. You will be getting notice soon of our AGM in Nov/December, so please do come along to that if you can. More generally, please contact any of us on the committee if you have any questions for us, or if you would be interested in getting involved with the Executive Committee.
Lorraine Grace (Chairperson of the Executive Committee)
From the PA….
We are delighted to confirm that the highlight of the RMDS social calendar, the RMDS Christmas Fair, will go ahead this year on Saturday 11th December from 11 to 3pm! RMDS Christmas Trees will be on sale during the two previous weekends.
So as not to undo all the hard work by the school in keeping RMDS safe, we will hold the fair in the yard again this year. All of your regular favourite stalls will be there including RMDS Merchandise, 6th Class Business Initiatives, and of course Santa!!
A great day out for all the family is guaranteed! We will advise about COVID procedures closer to the date.
The fair is our biggest school fundraiser, so please save the date. We need your support!
Here's how you can help in the run up to the fair:
Looking forward to a great Fair!
Christmas Fair Committee
From the Green Schools Committee....
The Right to Repair
It's in the interest of manufacturers to make electrical products that are physically difficult to repair or not worth the expense of repairing.
This can be through making it impossible to open the case without destroying the product, discouraging opening it by using glue or proprietary screws or simply by limiting the supply of spare parts and repair manuals. It could also be through overcharging for spare parts or threatening to invalidate the warranty if the product case is opened or if it has been repaired by a third party. Even if you do bring it to the manufacturer for repair, they will often tell you that repairs are impossible or too expensive.
Of course, by discouraging repair, this leads to more electronic waste and more expense to the consumer.
There is an EU wide campaign for the ‘Right to Repair’. See www.repair.eu for more information. The goals are for Good Design to allow easy disassembly and replacement of key components. Fair Access to ensure that repair should be accessible, affordable and mainstream. Finally, Informed Consumers that can know ahead of purchasing a product, how repairable it is through a scoring system.
Roland Ramsden
Andrea Scott
Green Schools Committee Parent Representatives
THIS WEEK’S
News from around the Classes…..
Junior Infants
We saw a grey squirrel in the park this week.
We love playing in the park.
We played with pasta and bears, scoops, spoons and ladles.
We are learning about the number 1.
Senior Infants
We’ve had great fun this week with our new interactive board. We’ve played Jolly Phonics and Gaeilge games on it and everyone had a turn. We also started GAA this week. We've already practiced lots of skills. Our theme in Aistear is the Café. We've made a café in the classroom and we’re having lots of fun playing in it.
Rang 1
There was lots of excitement in school this week as we came back from the mid-term. There was lots of chat about what we got up to during Halloween on Monday and we spent the rest of the week settling back into school life. On Monday, we changed pods and spent some lunchtimes playing with the new people in our pod. We have been learning about different types of houses and all of the important things that our homes provide us with. In art, we read a story called "When Pigasso Met Mootisse" and then created our own Picasso inspired abstract portraits. We visited Linear Park for P.E. and had lots of fun playing different games. We have also started to learn about the festival of Diwali and are wishing everyone a very happy Diwali this month!
Rang 2
Hello everyone! It's great to be back in school together again this week, although it is a little colder. Our theme for the coming fortnight is Food or Bia in Irish. We have been learning about food groups and how important good nutrition is for our growing bodies, bones and teeth . We also discussed how we can access sustainable food in Ireland at our local farmers’ markets and to buy Irish in the supermarkets,
We are also learning about procedural writing in English. This genre of text tells us how to follow steps, and of course as we are learning all about food we are examining and following recipes.
Our focus in art this week is Andy Warhol and in particular his pop art. Our food pop art creations will be here to view next week.
On Thursday the Hindu festival of Diwali began. We re-read the adventurous story of Rama and Sita, and looked at how this festival of lights is celebrated today.
We hope your weekend is filled with light!
Rang 3
A busy first week back after half term! We had a fantastic Halloween dress up day on the last day of term with some brilliant costumes. Well done everyone for such a fantastic effort! We enjoyed the parade and also had some well deserved treats and rewards for our excellent hard work over the past few weeks.
This week in Forest School we had some teachers visiting from Denmark who were very interested to see the way we do Forest School in RMDS. They also have Forest School in their country. We did some arts and crafts again using natural materials. We also learnt about how spiders make their webs and Claudia told us a story about spider web making. We played a game where we created a spider web of our own. We learn so much in the forest. We even learnt to sort out our disagreements. We have been organising ourselves into tribes, protecting our dens and learning how to compromise!
In maths this week we were learning about subtraction. We can now subtract 3 digit numbers with regrouping using a formal method.
In English we have been learning how to write reports. We read about Red Eyed Sea Monsters in order to help us with the language used in report writing. We also made up some other very funny creatures. Ask us about them! We can recite some of our reports to you.
In Gaeilge we have our Halloween puppet shows to show you. Please follow the links below in order to view them. We worked really hard on them. We hope you enjoy them!
Finally, in art and history we have started looking at the Ancient Maya civilization. We created masks based on those that the Maya would have worn. Here is a picture of some of them.
We have been using a lot of mindfulness techniques this week in order to help us be calm and to focus. Ask us about the balloon meditation which we all found useful.
We have been using a lot of mindfulness techniques this week in order to help us be calm and to focus. Ask us about the balloon meditation which we all found useful.
Rang 4
Maths: We did fractions.
History: We have nearly finished our Viking projects which are very interesting.
English: We are doing procedural writing so we baked some shortbread biscuits! See the pictures below! :)
Stem: We are doing the STEPS engineering project. We watched another video/webinar for STEPS.
We watched cool chemistry videos at lunch on Wednesday.
We are all looking forward to Peace Proms in February 2022!!
We named our new pods:
Pod 1: The Fat Rats Pod 2: Haven't decided yet
Pod 3: Barny the Dinos Pod 4: The Awesome Animals
Pod 5: The Winky Ducks Pod 6: The Pog Champs
By Romy & Molly
Rang 5
Hello New Term!
First thing Monday morning we moved places, which was fun as some of us are in a new pod or a new seat. We painted autumn trees during our art lesson on Monday as there are beautiful coloured trees all around us at the moment. We listened to a variety of different pieces of music from films and we drew what we imagined and visualised. This week we are being very mindful of everything we taste and touch from our lunches. We ate silently which was relaxing and totally different. We are very good at it! We played soccer and hockey at PE. We focused on passing in hockey.
In English we read about earthquakes, in Core Curriculum we are continuing our study of Islam, in SESE we are starting our Mayan projects and we are working hard at our division tables for long division in maths. On Thursday we did a surprise fire drill that went well and in other news the front door is now fixed but we are not using it yet as it’s not fully ready.
Thanks for reading!
Rang 6
Hi everyone!
We had a fun and busy week this week .
We started fractions in maths this week. They are hard but we are getting the hang of it. We were simpliflying, adding, subtracting and dealing with mixed numbers.
For art we were cutting out pieces of coloured paper and sticking them on a piece of white paper to make tessellations. We had a great time. We continued on our positive affirmations.
We started learning counting stars in Gaeilge. It was very fun and it wasn't too hard.
We were doing persuasive writing in English and wrote speeches on what school job we would want.
In P.E this week we played hockey and soccer but it was freezing, and we had great fun.
We studied the physical geography of Africa and Australia and drew maps and marked famous landmarks.
We finished our class novel, ‘The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’, watched the movie and made covers.
This week Limor in our class took part in the U12 World Championships in Irish dancing. She came 7th in the solo jig. What an amazing achievement, we are so proud of her!!
Have a great weekend!!!
by Darcy and Ailbhe
Ranelagh Multi-Denominational School, Ranelagh Road, Dublin 6, D06 Y658
Telephone/Fax: (01) 4961722 ● E-mail: secretary@rmds.ie
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Roll No. 19928Q ● Principal: Rosemarie Stynes
