Scratch Quiz on Male Animals

Check out Matthew's game to see how many male animals you can name.

Dathanna le Sharmaine

Sharmaine used Scratch to create a Colours Quiz. The quiz is in the Irish language and she has included the names of the colours on the screen to facilitate spelling.

Wild Flowers of Spring Project

Recently we received a package in the post from students in  College Paul Fort  a school located in the town of Is Sur Tille about twenty kilometers north of Dijon in Eastern France.

The package contained information and drawings of the cowslip a flower that they selected as their favourite spring flower. They will be surprised that we found a cowslip growing in the lawn outside out school door.

We selected some spring flowers growing near our school. We dried some specimens and lated illustrated them.

Here are our favourites

Wild Garlic

Lesser Celandine

Daisy

Wild Atlantic Way

Today we were collaborating on a group project finding out tourist attractions on the Wild Atlantic Way.

Created with Padlet

Letters to Bialystock

Fifth class pupils were busy to-day responding to letters from their ePals in Szkola Podstawowa
nr 37 Bialystock, Poland. We are collaborating with   these students as part of an eTwinning project  on Celtic Traditions in Europe. We are looking forward to " meeting " them online later in the month.




Pupils from one of our eTwinning partner school dancing a traditional Irish dance called the Walls of Limerick.

Kyle's Post Showcased on 100 Word Challenge

Congratulations to Kyle whose story was selected for Week 29 100 Word Challenge Special Showcase.  One thousand, two hundred and seventy students submitted stories in Week 29 so it was a fantastic achievement for Kyle to be selected from this group. 
Visit 100 Word Challenge showcase to read Kyle's story and the writing of all those selected for Week 29
Kyle was the second student from our class selected for showcasing on 100WC. I hope that it will proove to be an inspiration for the others to follow in their footsteps.

100 Word Challenge provides a purpose for children to engage in creative writing at school. Each week a prompt is given and children can use up to 100 words to write a creative piece. The writing is posted on the child’s personal blog and linked to the 100 Word Challenge website. Children from all over the world participate and guaranteeing a greater audience for each child’s work and with it greater motivation for writing. Their audience comes via the comments that are left on their posts.

Gaeilge

Jamie used Tagxedo to create a design on what Easter means to him.

Scratch Game on the Birds of KIlbarrack

How good are you at recognising the local birds? Test your knowlwedge by playing this game. There are three levels in the game


Level 1 Tests your knowledge of the most common birds.


Level 2 concentrates on larger birds. You will notice several of them walking around searching for food on the ground on your way to school

Level 3 concentrates on winter visitors to the area as well as some sea birds that come inland when there is very bad weather. this level also includes the waxwing.This exotic bird flew all the way from Siberia and unfortunatley was found dead in the grounds of Scoil Eoin

Birds of Kilbarrack

This term we have been studying the birds that are living in our community.All of these birds in our project have been seen within a 300 metre arc of our school. In our school grounds we have a wide variety of trees and a large grassy area which provided a habitat for many of these birds. Due to our close proximity to the sea shore we are also visited by wading birds such as the Curlew and Oystercatcher.

We are very fortunate in Kilbarrack that so many birds have managed to survive in this suburban environment.

Sparrows roosting at the Dart station

Starlings

Brent Geese

Irish Legends and Celtic Art

We used Photostory to tell two well known Irish legends







We drew our inspiration from examples of Celtic Art especially those used in The Book of Kells one of the world's greatest manuscripts. We marvelled at the degree of skill, patience and concentration that was required by the scribes to produce such magnificent work.

Celtic Homes

The Celts in Ireland settled down throughout the countryside. Forts were the most common type of homestead.

Hillforts

Strong kings lived in hillforts. They chose a site on the top of the hill which gave them a good view of the countryside round them. They dug a deep ditch around the hill and used the earth to form a bank on the inside of the ditch.
The most famous hill fort in Ireland is at TARA

Ringforts

The most usual type of forts were the ringforts. There are still remains of the ringforts in the Irish Countryside.They measure 12 to 65 meters in diameter.They were surrounded by a sitch abd ab earthen bank. They built a house inside the ringfort. They made a roof of thatch made from straw or rushes. A hole was left in the riif to allow the ssmoke to escape. The interior was one large room.The floor was covered with dry rushes.
some ringforts had underground passages called souterraines which were used for storage or as an escape route in times of danger. LInk to Ringfort In rural Ireland people were reluctant to go on to ringforts so that they wouldn't disturb the fairies. They feared that the fairies would bring misfortune to their lives. Today many ringforts have disappeared and the fairies were powerless to save them.

Crannóg

The word crannog comes from the Irish word for tree and uas usualy a partly man-made island. The island was constructedd using piles of stones, branches, logs and tree trunks They built a stockade round the edge. Inside huts were constructed. They used a wooden dug-out or a small skin-covered going to and from the mainland.

Link to a reconstructed crannóg

Stoneforts

In the west of Ireland in places where there was little soil stone forts were built. These are great circular walls of stone, sometimes up to 5 meters thick. There was just one narrow entrance to the fort. Inside, fitted into the walls they built steps for the warriors to keep guard or defend the fort when attacked.

Dún Aengus is a fine example of a stonefort

There's a Boy in the Girls' Bathroom

Bradley Chalkers

Bradley Chalkers is a lonely, strange, bold yet good character. Deep down Bradley is very loving and caring, but he’s too afraid to show it. Bradley is also smart. He is very tough at the start of the book. As the book goes deeper and deeper you realise that Bradley is a very mixed up character

Carla’s Diary

My First Day at Red Hill School
Dear Diary,

It’s me Carla and I’m the new counsellor in Red Hill School. I’m finding it hard to adjust. The other teacher looked at me in a strange way, I think it might be because they have other friends and don’t want to be friends with me. The first person that came to my office was a boy called Jeff Fishkin. Jeff seems like a sweet boy. Jeff is a good boy in a bad situation but deep down he is a very sweet boy. He is friends with a boy called Bradley, well I think that they are friends. Jeff is so kind and he is my first friend in the school. HOORAH.
Next Bradley came in. I felt confident. I was so happy to have a friend I forgot all the bad things that people had told me about him. Bradley came in looking at the floor. He started talking to me. We were talking for a little while; I started to realize that he was a dull boy. I let him draw a picture. Then he left. I think Bradley is quite strange.

Carla.

Bradley Chalkers used to be the meanest in his class but with some help from Carla his counsellor he is gradually becoming very nice. In the last Chapter Bradley and Jeff were going to Colleen’s birthday party. Bradley was going to Carla’s office on Saturday because she was leaving to be a kindergarten teacher in another school and he didn’t like it so he didn’t go. Later he changed his mind. He ran over to her desk and she wasn’t there and he found a letter that she had written to him and read it. He tried to write a letter back but he couldn’t.

Rebekah selected Carla as her favourite character.	Bradley is Vicky's favourite character

Jemelah and Áine made a Scratch game to test your knowledge of the novel

Letters to Bialystock

Today we finsihed our letters to our eTwinning pals in Bialystock in Poland. Alanna, Jemelah and Vicky scanned them in so that we could email them. We will be looking forward to reading their letters.

Podcast with Sofia from Sweden

We had very many questions for Sofia. Áine and Jamelah organised the podcast.Listen to it to find out more about her country.

5th class students with Sofia on her last day.

Here are some of our images of Sweden.They cover many topics ranging from recycling, environmental protection, Swedish stores, Swedish footballer Zlantan Ibrahimovic, to Minecraft developer and PewDiePie who currently has the most visited YouTube channel.

Capital Cities Game

I hope that you will enjoy playing this game and in the process learn more about the other countries participating in our eTwinning project. It is important that you spell the names of the cities accurately otherwise the game won't work. Here is a list of the cities Paris, Warsaw, Bucharest Madrid and of course Dublin but not in that order.



Click on the green flag to start the game.

Life in Sweden

Sweden is a country located in Scandinavia in the north of Europe. it has a population of 9.1 million inhabitants and  most of them live in the southern part of the country. This is because the north of Sweden is really cold. 

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 Sweden has large areas with forest and 10% of the country is covered with lakes and rivers. In the forest there are many different wild animals such as moose, wolves, beavers, bears, lynx, wild boar, fox and deer.

Sweden joined the EU in year 1995 but chose to keep the countries own currency called Krona. 

 The Swedish inhabitants speak Swedish but also start learning to speak and read  English as a second language from the age of ten  in school.

My city is called Linköping.

I'm from Sweden's seventh largest city called Linköping. My city is famous for the production of military aircrafts. The best known aircraft  manufactured there is the JAS 39 Gripen. We also have an Air Force Museum where you can learn the history of aircraft and see many old airplanes.

In Sweden it usually starts snowing in early December. We usually have a white Christmas and the snow remains on the ground until March. The snow is often up to 30 cm. deep. In winter time all car owners must replace their car tyres with special spiked wheels to prevent the cars skidding in the snow. Early in the morning a snow plough clears the streets and the snow is piled up on the side of the street. Swedish children often make tunnels and caves in these great mounds of snow.

The picture on the right shows a snölyckta which means a snow lantern. It takes a lot of snowballs to build this hollow tower with a small opening. When it gets dark outside we insert a small tea light to light it up. Many people have these lights in their garden in the winter time.

In my town we are very concerned about protecting the environment and have developed several energy efficient ways to do this. In the Recycling station a scanner is used to segregate general household  waste  from green waste.The general household waste is converted into electricity which is used to heat homes.Green waste and all food waste is converted into biogas. This biogas is used as fuel in all the busses and taxis in the city. 

eTwinning Award by Sophie

eTwinning is a community for schools in Europe. It enables schools to work together on educational projects. In autumn 2013 Fifth class pupils started an eTwinning project called Thick as Thieves with pupils from Limnos Island Greece, Tanus in France and Helsinki in Finland. As part of the project we got our own personal logins.We each got an e-pal where we send e-mails to each other on the eTwinning site and were able to send messages to pupils in the other countries.We did projects together and shared them with each other through a blog. We cooked Greek,French and Spanish foods in recipe books that our pals from abroad sent us in the mail. I enjoyed making the Greek and French food most it was delicious.We also wrote things and shared them on our blog.

My e-pal was Emily from France and we are still in contact today. We are going to become pen pals and write letters to each other.

In December 2014 our class won an award for participating in E-Twinning . The award was an honour to win. I enjoyed participating in E-Twinning.It was an amazing experience. I hope to take part in it again some day.