Mrs. Crotty's Message 1st June 2020
Dear Parents, Guardians and Students, I hope everyone is well and has had an enjoyable bank holiday weekend. We find ourselves now in the final month of the school year and on the home stretch. We would like to take this opportunity to thank parents for all the wonderful work you have done with your children and to thank the students themselves for doing so well in what have often been difficult circumstances. I would also like to acknowledge the huge amount of effort that the teachers have put into preparing quality lessons for remote learning. I think everyone will agree that they have done a great job. I really feel that all parties in the school community have worked well together to ensure that the impact of the closure on the children's education has been minimal while at the same time, being mindful of the wellbeing of our students and their families. Having said all of that, due to a number of factors, for example, the weather, the prolonged nature of the school closure, and the motivation levels of the students, I think we are seeing that home schooling is taking its toll and book learning is becoming increasingly difficult for students and more stressful for parents. We have therefore decided as a staff that for the last two and a half weeks in June we will not prescribe book work for the children and will not upload work to the website in the usual way. Instead, we will run two specially themed weeks, whereby every pupil can engage in active learning without sitting at a table completing lessons. The week beginning Monday 8th June will be Active Week and the following week, beginning June 15th will be Arts Week. We will provide the finer details of these weeks in due course and we hope the children will engage in the learning activities provided and enjoy them as much as possible. On an unrelated note, we want to design a crest and devise a motto for our school and we want the children to be as involved in this process as possible. Please see the School Updates section on the home page of our website for details of how we would like you and your children to get involved. Wishing everybody a lovely week and we would encourage all our terrific pupils to get on board for this, their final week of book work / traditional learning for the academic year 2019/2020. It is certainly one that we won't forget although we will all be glad to put it behind us and I would ask everyone to say a prayer and to keep everything crossed for a traditional return to school in September. Kind regards, Áine Crotty Principal |