We really got into the Halloween spirit today when our Parent Teacher Partnership, Floral Art Greystones and the Vanilla Pod Carrickmines combined to give our children a great Halloween experience of pumpkin decorating. Many thanks to all who helped out scooping out the pumpkins and of course those helpers who worked with the children today, Adrienne from Floral Art and Heather and Fiona from our PTP.

Once again many thanks to Floral Art Greystones for providing the flowers and expertise today and to the Vanilla Pod in Carrickmines for providing the huge number of pumpkins.

Please go to our gallery for a look at some of the amazing creations from today.

Today was the last day of the first year of Greystones CNS. We started the year dancing with Go Noodle so it is only right that we finish it dancing and many thanks to one of our parents who came in to do a fantastic Zumba Kids session with the Junior Infants.

We would like to thank all of our parents and guardians for making our first year such a success. We have faced challenges, as any brand new school does, and you have supported us unfailingly; this has been a massive help to us over the year. Such great parent-school partnership goes to the core of what the Community National School is about and thank you for this. We will be a very different entity with 4 times the children come Sept but we look forward to going from strength to strength into the future. We wish all our pupils and their families a restful and enjoyable Summer break.

Today was the day the children had eagerly awaited, our first Sports Day. The weather was reasonably kind to us in that the rain stayed away to allow the children to enjoy a full day of enjoyable activities. Our parents arrived to cheer on the kids and then got really into it by competing in a few races. All in all, a really fun day for all concerned and well done to all of our children for displaying such amazing sporting prowess.

We were all massively proud of our Parent Teacher Partnership members who braved the Vhi Women's Mini Marathon on Monday last in order to raise funds for the school. It was a fantastic achievement by the magnificent seven who completed the course in at times less than pleasant weather. Thank you so much to all of those who took part and to all of our parents who collected sponsorship for the day.

We were absolutely thrilled to receive an email yesterday that all of our children's and teachers' hard work had paid off and we had won a prestigious Science Foundation Ireland Discover Science and Maths Plaque of STEM Excellence (Science, Technology, Engineering & Maths) for the 2015/16 academic year. This was an amazing achievement by our Junior Infants in our first year who put together some excellent project work over the course of several months. We will now be able to display proudly or Plaque of STEM excellence. Congrats to all of our children and well done to Ms Hunt, Ms Campbell and Ms Pappas for all their trojan efforts.



Below is a link to our previous post on this award if you want to take a look at what the children had to do to secure this award.


http://www.greystonescns.ie/news/discover-primary-science-maths-awards

Discovery Primary Science & Maths
http://primaryscience.ie/awards_16.php



In recent weeks the children of Greystones CNS have been proving their mettle when it comes to producing some outstanding work in Science, Maths and ICT. All of this work has been brought together to enter the Discover Primary Science and Maths awards and to look through all that they have done is a testament to the fantastic effort put forth since Sept. We must also recognise the amazing efforts of Ms Hunt to bring this together - as you can see there has been a mammoth amount of work involved and to achieve this standard  with such young students is amazing. Well done children! Great job Ms Hunt!



You can see their work at the following link

http://greystonescnsscience.weebly.com/

Last Friday the children embarked on a mini beast hunt in the lovely grounds of the Rugby Club. Our intrepid explorers searched high and low for a selection of creepy crawlies and managed to unearth slugs, snails and millipedes among others on their list. It really is great to have the run of the entire grounds and as the weather improves we will no doubt be embarking on more nature inspired adventures - starting with Monday 25th April when we have our very own Horticulturalist coming to deliver an inspiring Nature and Biodiversity day to the children. You can see more pics at our Gallery.

Today was a momentous day in the history of Greystones CNS as the greatest game on Earth was played for the first time. Under the expert and enthusiastic tutelage of Coach Tommy our children began what will hopefully be a life-long love of the most skillful sport there is, or ever was. The children enjoyed getting to try all of the equipment provided to us by our neighbours, Eire Óg GAA, who have also been allowing us to use their fantastic hall for some months now.  You can see more of the adventures of our little Cuchulainns at our Gallery and no doubt some future Eire Og and Wicklow GAA stars.          

We have been seeing some great ICT lessons of late where the children have been completing some fantastic computer programming using Scratch Jr software. The children love using the interactive whiteboard as well as the tablet to "write their codes". We really have some budding IT experts of the future on our hands at Greystones CNS where we are committed to preparing our children for the future by ensuring high levels of computer literacy. You can see more pics at our Gallery.