Many thanks to the team from Core Kids for the delivery of their online fitness lesson during Children's Mental Health week. 

Lots of our pupils from different classes thoroughly enjoyed participating!

#KnowYourGrowYourself

During Children's Mental Health Week it was very fitting to welcome Sarah from the Nurture Advisory and Support Service to complete a series of sessions on the use of the Nurture in 5 programme. 

This programme provides a practical application of emotional health and wellbeing techniques within a nurturing approaches framework.  Over the coming weeks Sarah will be modelling the use of the programme in all classrooms and providing advise of the best use of resources.  To date the children have been enjoying the sessions and staff have found it most beneficial.  Thank you Sarah and we look forward to welcoming you back after Mid-Term Break!

#KnowYourselfGrowYourself

Our Digital Leaders introduced Safer Internet Day to the whole school via a virtual assembly on Tuesday morning.  The Digital Leaders then take part in their fifth Dream Space Ambassador’s Workshop where they explored the role of influencers and algorithms in the lives of pupils.

The Digital Leaders have also been working hard to create a number of tasks for our pupils to complete on Safer Internet Day to include:

· P1-P3: Colouring Competition

· P4-P7: Just2easy collage activity.

Prizes will be awarded to the winning entries in each category.        

#saferinternetday

Safer Internet Day is the UK’s biggest celebration of online safety. Each year we cover an online issue or theme that speaks to the things young people are seeing and experiencing online.

Safer Internet Day 2025 is due to take place on Tuesday 11th February.  However as we will be closed for Mid Term we marked Safer Internet Day on 4th February 2025, with celebrations and learning based around the theme:                                                                              

‘Too good to be true? Protecting yourself and others from scams online’.

To mark Safer Internet Day,  please find a link below to a parent information session on online safety which we receive as part of our annual subscription to Knowsley Council

 https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1BxcZWQ4XcUonNO8C1v-auZq65-AZx9gH?usp=sharing

A copy of the video/presentation is also available on their website for those who would prefer to watch it via a browser:

https://www.knowsleyclcs.org.uk/online-safety-parent-session-jan-2025/

We hope you find this useful and informative.

Today we held our January Assemblies.  Our assemblies provided us with an opportunity to talk about Safer Internet Day,  the theme of 'Know Yourself, Grow Yourself' for Children's Mental Health Week and our new Character Trait of 'Diligence' for the month of February.  We also celebrated achievements in school and through participation in a variety of extra-curricular activities.  Congratulations to our January Award Winners - keep up all those wonderful and varied talents.  Well done!   

A big thank you to all our Year 3 Grandparents, extended family and friends who came into school today to hear the beautiful singing, storytelling and poetry of our children.  Visitors enjoyed some light refreshments and were then invited to spend some time with the children in their classrooms.

Also, a big thank you to the Year 3 teachers and classroom assistants for the beautiful gifts the children made for their Grandparents.  This was indeed a very fitting conclusion to our celebrations for Catholic Schools Week.

Today Year 7EA came together with our partner schools to celebrate the diversity in our culture.  Members from the Ulster Scot’s Society joined us today to explore the musical and costume traditions and the history of the language and how it is incorporated into how we speak today.

They played the bagpipes and showed us the traditional costume for parades and special events.  They also explained the history of the Ulster Scots settlements, origins of the language and how we use these words nowadays.  Our very own Miss Hannon even performed an Irish dance for everyone!  We had great fun learning and playing together.

Our Girls' Soccer Team embraced their four games during the first week’s round of the Antrim and Newtownabbey Girls’ Soccer League with enthusiasm, sportsmanship and skill!  Over four hard fought games our hard-hitting strikers scored 7 goals in total securing two wins and two narrow losses.  Well done girls - we look forward to Round 2!

We were delighted to receive so many new books to support our literacy programme and the Year 5 - Year 7 pupils with the Accelerated Reading Programme.  We were also able to order sets of dictionaries for our Year 3 and 4 classes.  We were able to purchase these books and dictionaries with the £2,400 commission we received from our latest Book Fair purchases.

We would like to thank all those who supported the Book Fair which had enabled us to acquire these additional reading and literacy resources.  They will certainly be put to good use.  Members of our Pupil Council will showcase the new books purchased to all the pupils at our school assemblies next week.

Our Year 4HW pupils enjoyed their second very informative Shared Education ICT session this morning.  Today it was St. Joseph's turn to host with Crumlin Integrated Primary having hosted last week. 

The workshops focus on the use of the programme Scratch and are led by computer programmer Mrs. Shona Ward.  Scratch is a visual programming language that allows students to create their own interactive stories, games and animations.  The children were engaged throughout and produced lots of very creative work.  Many thanks to Shona for leading the sessions and we look forward to continuing with the workshops next week.