School Blog

Admission Policy April 30th

To view our new Admission policy, please click on the link below

Admission policy April 2020

Any comments, queries or questions should be directed to the Principal who can be contacted by emailing rnsns19@gmail.com

Chess activities

Teachers from www.ficheall.ie have been in touch to share these great ideas:

1. The Ficheall Challenge – challenge the students in your school to teach someone new in their household. It could be a brother or sister, mother or father. To help with this, one of the talented and tech savvy teachers in the Ficheall network has created videos demonstrating the mini-games approach to teaching chess which the Ficheall website details and which are explained at the chess summer courses. These are available on the Ficheall_ie Twitter account here (you don’t need a Twitter account to view) and also on the Ficheall.ie YouTube channel here.
2. Moves for Life is running an art competition – design your own chess set from junk materials in the house. All you have to do is make the set, and send a photo of it into mfl@movesforlife.ie. See www.movesforlife.ie for more details. All sets will be displayed on their facebook page so just photograph the set if you don’t want your child’s photo online.
3. Chessossity (chess lessons, puzzles) is free for the next two months and they’re running a puzzle-solving championship until May 31st. It starts next Monday 30th March. For more information see this link  http://movesforlife.ie/uncategorized/online-chess-for-kids-spring-2020-program/  and then go to www.chessossity.com to register.
4. Chessbud Ireland YouTube Channel – International Master Mark Quinn is planning to upload a new video each week for Irish primary school students who already know the basics of chess and are keen to learn new tactics and strategies. He has created three playlists for students to choose from: Beginner’s Mind (for students who understand the pieces and checkmate), Challengers and Masters. . Where possible Mark will feature the tactics of Irish chess players. He is planning to upload weekly lessons for free during school closures.
5. ChessKid.com are offering free gold membership for the next two months. Lessons, puzzles and online games. Use this link to get free gold membership –  https://www.chesskid.com/promo/brainblox.

Activities to keep children busy!

Suggested activities for children of all ages from Junior Infants – 6th class:

– Joe Wicks has a huge range of child-friendly workouts on his YouTube channel. He has new ones every morning this week at 9am which last for 30 minutes. You can find these and shorter workouts here   https://www.youtube.com/user/thebodycoach1

– There are loads of interesting lego challenges and ideas here  https://www.freehomeschooldeals.com/category/lego/

– RTE will broadcast 1 hour school lessons from 11am – 12pm each day on RTE2 from next Monday

-The author David Walliams (who is really popular with children!) is doing audio readings from his series The World’s Worst Children every day at 11am. You can find more details at https://www.worldofdavidwalliams.com/

– You will find more free audible stories for children at https://stories.audible.com/start-listen

– A teacher in Co. Clare has created this fantastic resource https://padlet.com/parteensolosinging/zfdq5n59llog which has plenty of ideas for children of all ages from Junior Infants – 6th class

– 25 non-screen activity suggestions https://medium.com/pobble/simple-and-fun-non-screen-activities-that-children-can-do-at-home-115543cb3b9c

– There are some lovely Irish stories being read aloud here, you will recognise some of them no doubt! https://soundcloud.com/search?q=walker+eireann&fbclid=IwAR0hsRoTHasAwd62Won1nT5Nlcb7JoBLZyTbOEHGk_qi5k9xVwgC7rK0dPk 

Hope these are of some help!

If you need any more ideas or support or if any pupil would like to send us a video or photo of their work or just want to say hi, please be aware that we are monitoring the school email constantly during this closure. The address is rnsns19@gmail.com.

Stay safe everyone, we miss you all and can’t wait to go back to school as soon as it is safe!

Eimear, Mary, Anne, Claire, Carmel and Geraldine