Category: Image

World Book Day is just around the corner on March 4th.

Mrs. O’Reilly has put together a fantastic group of resources for both our junior (Junior Infants to 2nd Class) and senior (3rd to 6th Class) classes.

To have a look at the resources, click the link below:

Junior Classes Padlet of Resources

Senior Classes Padlet of Resources

Ms Geoghegan has been very busy and with help of family and friends, made these amazing traditional Irish music video tutorials. The videos introduce musical instruments, their appearance, characteristics and sounds. We are then also treated to samples of traditional reels and jigs being played on the instrument in question.

They’re a lovely resource to have and something different to add to our homeschool resources. Enjoy below.

We normally have started our Team Hope Christmas Shoebox Appeal at this point of the year. But like so many things, this year’s appeal will be a little different.

As today was supposed to be our last day in school this school year, we’ve put together a short video to celebrate the great work, resilience and enthusiastic nature of our students and also everyone in our school community. This year has certainly been strange, demanding and quite difficult but we have come together (from a distance!) and overcome so many of the challenges the pandemic set us. Well done, everyone and we can’t wait to see everyone again soon.

Please do not share the below video via social media. It will always be available on this page.

You truly are an awesome group of pupils. We’ve had an amazing response to our Positivity Poster activity throughout the school in the last 2 weeks. We asked you to create a poster displaying a positive message to reflect how positive and resilient we have all been in these last 3 months during this strange time.

See if you can see your poster above or below. We will add all individual posters to our Activity Gallery in the coming days.

We’ve been so impressed with our pupils’ positivity and resilience during this challenging time. To celebrate this, we’re asking all our pupils to create a ‘Poster of Positivity’. We’d really love to get as many entries as possible as the final product would make a lovely end-of-year keepsake that we could put together and display here on the website and our class blog pages.

Your poster could contain a positive message, slogan or quote and a picture to go with it – something that makes you smile. It could contain drawings of things, activities or people that have brought you happiness during this time. We’ve included some sample slogans you could use below but feel free to make up your own of course! Be as creative as you’d like.

Please send us a photo or scan of the poster to your class teachers at the usual addresses by Friday 19^th June.

Junior Infants – juniorinfantsteachers@virginians.ie

Senior Infants – seniorinfantsteachers@virginians.ie

1st Class – 1stclassteachers@virginians.ie

2nd Class – 2ndclassteachers@virginians.ie

3rd Class – 3rdclassteachers@virginians.ie

4th Class – 4thclassteachers@virginians.ie

5th Class – 5thclassteachers@virginisns.ie

6th Class – 6thclassteachers@virginians.ie

The DEN – denteacher@virginians.ie

Every class will be putting their posters together to make one big collage of positivity that truly represents how strong and adaptable our fantastic pupils are! We look forward to seeing your entries.

Sample slogans and quotes for your poster:

• Keep smiling!
• Keep calm and carry on.
• Difficult roads often lead to beautiful places.
• “Don’t let what you can’t do stop you from doing what you can do.” – John Wooden
• “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” – Theodore Roosevelt
• “Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass. It’s about learning how to dance in the rain.” – Vivian Greene

St. Mary’s N.S. has recently been awarded the Pieta House Amber Flag for promoting Positive
Mental Health in our school for the school year 2019-2020. We set and achieved goals
throughout the year.

We established a Healthy Minds Committee with pupils from 1st to 6th class. We had monthly
meetings with the Healthy Minds Committee where the pupils discussed ideas for promoting
mental health and wellbeing in our school. They worked very hard during the year.

We ran a Jersey Day for World Mental Health Day in October 2019, where we raised money for
Pieta House. We ran a Health and Wellbeing Week in January 2020. We had lots of activities
incorporating mental health, wellness and mindfulness. We also ran a Health and Wellbeing
Poster Competition as part of Wellbeing Week. We also have a Health and Wellbeing
noticeboard in the corridor, which we added to each term and displayed the winning posters.

Thank you to Mrs Brennan, Ms Lawlor, Mrs McHugh, Mrs O’Reilly, Ms McLean, Mrs Clerkin, Ms
O’ Reilly, Ms Olwill and Ms Gilcreest who were the staff Amber Flag Committee members.

All our teachers are trying their bets to provide pupils and parents/guardians with a range of learning tools each week in our class blogs. This may be in the form of PowerPoint presentations, online learning, set work from schoolbooks/e-books and worksheets/booklets. We try to avoid the need for pupils/parents/guardians to print resources as much as possible. However, this is not always possible or some pupils prefer to have a physical copy of a resource in front of them rather than use a document on a computer/tablet screen. We also understand that parents/guardians sometimes prefer to reduce screen-time and therefore would prefer to print.

All our resources in blogs can be printed but we are going to just give a guide here on how to print various files. Most of the files teachers post on the blogs are saved on our Staff Google Drive and so may be different to what parents are used to when it comes to online printing. Various files, whether pictures (.jpg, .png), PDF files, Google Docs, Google Slides etc. are all slightly different when it comes to printing. So following the below guide, based on the file type, will help you to print any file teachers post. (Please not these instructions are based on PCs/laptops and may vary on tablet devices.)

PDF Files

PDF files are one of the most common that parents/guardians wish to print. They appear as below with a page guide and zoom toggle at the bottom and a grey arrow to the top right of the file.

To print a PDF from the blog, we need to click that grey arrow in the top right corner. A new tab will open with the full PDF file displayed as below. From here, click the print icon to the top right of the screen in order to print.

Picture Files

Picture files are also very common on our blogs. Many teachers screenshot pages from e-books or use pictures from online. Teachers upload pictures in too different ways and so there are two different ways to print the picture.

1. If teachers share the picture from our Google Drive, when you click on the picture a new tab will open showing a bigger version on the picture. Now, all you need to do is click on print icon to top left of new tab (as below)

2. If teachers put the picture in the blog directly from their computer, clicking on the image will do nothing. Instead, right click the image and then select ‘Save image as’ in the drop-down menu. After saving the image, you can open the image in your photo-viewer (varies depending on Windows) and print directly from there.

Google Docs

Google Docs look just like Microsoft Word files. In order to print these we again click on the grey arrow at the top right corner of the file in blog pages.

A new tab will open and it will look similar to other Word Processing applications like Microsoft Word. Click on the File menu at the top left of the page.

In this drop down menu, go to the very bottom of the menu and select ‘Print’. Alternatively, when the new tab appears, press CTRL and the letter P at the same time.

We hope the above helps. But if you are still unsure regarding any files on the blogs, contact your child’s teacher via the email address in each class blog.