St. Eithne's GNS Newsletter

This month has been a very difficult one in our school community as we learned that our former staff member Ms. Bríd O'Donnell passed away after a brief illness.

We held a fundraiser on Monday and thank you to all for your kind donations which will be sent to the Irish Cancer Society in memory of Ms. O'Donnell. Well over €1,000 was raised in total.

Bríd was a passionate and caring teacher who gave so much to St. Eithne's over the six years she spent working in the school. The kindness she showed to all the children she taught will never be forgotten. May she rest in peace.

Our Green Schools Committee were delighted to have been awarded our school’s 6th Green Flag last week under the theme of Global Citizenship: Litter and Waste. Madison and Kyrah from 5th class collected the flag at a ceremony in the Helix Theatre in DCU and the whole committee celebrated last Friday with a pizza party.

Well done to all the girls involved and to Ms. O'Donovan for all her hard work to help us renew our flag!

This year, once again, St Eithne’s GNS has achieved a Research Ireland Curious Minds Gold Award. A huge well done to all the teachers involved and in particular, our STEM Coordinator Ms. Nolan!

Some feedback on all our hard work:

Congratulations to St. Eithne's Girls National School on your amazing achievement! Your school has done a lot of valuable STEM work throughout the year. Well done to all the learners and teachers, you should be very proud of yourselves. Your school was very busy during Science Week and it is great that you had the chance to learn about the digestive system and play Science games with your parents. It is amazing to see all the preparation that the learners put into their ESB Science Blast submission, your experiments were interactive and very interesting. Keep up all the amazing work future Scientists!

The girls had a fun filled week in St. Eithne’s GNS celebrating Multicultural and Arts week. They had African Drumming workshops, Hip Hop dance classes, Pottery, Lyrical Dance, Mindfulness, food from other countries and Yoga.

Thank you so much to all the teachers and the Parents’ Association for organising such lovely activities.

Huge congratulations to Ms. Wallace and her athletics team who performed so well in Morton Athletics Stadium last week. Notable performances include our U-12 relay team winning their heat and reaching the final, Marta (6th class) coming in 4th place overall in the shot put, and Sofia (5th class) winning her 80m heat and coming in 3rd place overall in the final! Well done to all who participated and put time into preparation.

We can't wait for next year already!

Hard luck to Ms. Pidgeon, Anto and the girls who were beaten by Gracepark ETNS in the final two weeks ago. They put up a brave fight and showed great determination, but it just wasn't their day.

We are very proud of them and all the supporters who came and cheered them on. They can certainly hold their heads up high. Many of the girls on the team won their league for St. Monica's at the weekend. What a way to bounce back! Well done girls!

Thank you also to Wash 'N' Go who looked after our gear all year round.

Ms. Reede's class really enjoyed their teddies and PJ picnic in the classroom on Monday. This month our class theme was helpers in the community. We have painted pictures of all the helpers, gone for nice walks in the area and practiced going to the post office, chemist and shop.

We have had a great time learning about teeth and how to take care of them in our class! We also had so much fun at our Multicultural days in school enjoying drumming, dance and yoga. We have been enjoying the good weather out on yard as well.

We have been very busy in 2nd Class and having lots of fun over the past few weeks! We celebrated our First Holy Communion on the 10th of May and were so excited. Before heading off for our celebrations, we had to do everything just as we had practised—singing, praying, and much more. We are very proud of ourselves and we had a lovely day! On Monday, we came into school proudly wearing our beautiful Communion dresses showing all the older girls and our teachers our style.

We also took part in Arts and Multicultural Day, where we enjoyed drumming, yoga, relaxing mindfulness activities, and even dancing! We were very lucky to try delicious foods from different countries, thanks to some of the older girls—and our very own Livia. We loved supporting the GAA team with the rest of the school at the Fingal League Final and we were so proud of them for reaching the final, well done girls!

We've been working really hard too! We’ve been revising for our Drumcondra Tests, finishing our class novel, and starting Buddy Reading with the older girls, which has been lots of fun.

To top it all off, we helped raise money during our PJ Party in honour of Ms. O’Donnell in aid of the Irish Cancer Society. We ended the day with a great big boogie at our school disco!

Love, 2nd Class

3rd class have been very busy over the past month. We found out last week that we are going to Explorium for our school trip and we are all so excited to go! We've been learning time with Ms. O'Meara and we are all very good at it!

Last week for Art, we did caricature drawings of our favourite celebrities! We had so much fun and it turned out great. Last Friday after yard, the whole school were surprised with an ice-cream van. It was so warm so we enjoyed it so much.

As some of you know, May is the month of Mary, so we have been doing lot's of religion and saying our Hail Mary every day. We also have been colouring lovely pictures of Mary. We've also been learning about Maori people in History with Ms. Bleheen. It's very interesting to learn what life was like before. We played a few rounds of Kahoot just for fun to see who learned the most in History.

By Érin and Mia.

We’ve had so much fun throughout the month of May here in 4th Class. We have been learning all about Capacity in Maths. We even made our own bubbles testing the strength of different mixtures where the capacity of the ingredients varied. In Science, we’ve been studying the life cycle of insects and built bug hotels to place in our schoolyard to help attract and support them. We were also lucky enough to be invited to Edenmore’s Sensory Garden, where Theresa, Pat, and Claire had prepared lots of fun team-building activities for us. We had such a great time working together and helping one another. On May 21st we celebrated Multicultural Day to honour and appreciate the diversity within our class and school community. Shazia and Zainab taught us all about Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia and even brought lots of delicious food from both countries for us to try. It was delicious! We’ve loved having outdoor lessons and enjoying some ice cream in the sunshine. We’re so excited for one last fun-filled month together in 4th class.

May has been a great month in 5th class filled with lots of learning and fun activities. We started Narrative writing in English and the girls have loved coming up with their story line, characters and settings.

We also had a great day for Multicultural Day where the girls participated in a drumming class, pottery lesson and dancing. We also had a chance to learn new facts about Romania and Brazil from Miriam and Sofia. We especially enjoyed the sweet treats.

Over the past few weeks, the fun has been nonstop in 6th Class! Alongside learning about the Circle in Math, starting to study World War II in History, and beginning to read ‘The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,’ we have been busy with lots of lovely activities!

We launched our JEP Project, Chew & Chug, at the Easter Fair, and it was a great success - we even rented a real slushie machine for the big day! We continued to sell our items for five weeks and earned an amazing €589! We are putting a portion of our profits towards paying for our school tour and donating to the Irish Cancer Society, however, we are still deciding on how to spend the remainder of our profits! Thanks to everyone who supported our business - we’ve got a real taste of what life can be like as entrepreneurs!

Recently, the GAA team played in the final of the Fingal League. While the outcome wasn’t what the girls had hoped for, they played brilliantly and have done themselves proud this year by making it to two league finals - a super way to finish out their time representing St.Eithne’s on the GAA pitch!

We also had some girls from our class and 5th class represent St.Eithne’s at Morton Stadium for the Cumann na mBunscol Athletics. It was fantastic to see the girls' progress from their work with Shane from Athletics Ireland to completing various events on a real running track! We want to say a big thank you to Ms Wallace for all her support!

Finally, we’ve been looking very stylish in our graduation hoodies, which arrived recently! We are busy coming up with ideas for our graduation ceremony and preparing for our final couple of weeks in St.Eithne’s!

We’re looking forward to launching our JEP Project at the Easter Fair this week and taking a well-deserved break over the Easter holidays after all our hard work this term!

As you can see from the above, we have been so busy in St. Eithne's over the month of May, from high quality teaching & learning, to fun and diverse extra-curricular activities and initiatives.

Next month we will be having school tours, active/wellbeing week, class handovers, and of course, our 6th class Graduation on Wednesday the 25th, at 11am.

We can't wait for June already!

Please email steithnesgns@gmail.com or call 01-8480630 if you have any questions or concerns.

Thank you for your continued support,

Cormac Henry

Principal