Christmas Newsletter 2021
Mercy Primary School
Christmas Newsletter 2021
Welcome to our Christmas Newsletter 2021. Another strange and unusual year for us all. Despite the difficulties and challenges, the staff and students of Mercy Primary School have had an excellent term. Special credit has to be given to the wonderful girls in our school – they have followed all the Covid-19 restrictions with a smile – girls you have been amazing! A special word to Third, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth classes – you have worn your masks without complaint. Well done!
Parents – thank you for your support – together we continue to get through this. The super staff of Mercy Primary – well done and have a great Christmas. Our school community is second to none and we are very proud of it!
We are very excited about the introduction of hot lunches. Our supplier will be School Food 4 Primary. They will install a kitchen in the school and hot lunches will be prepared daily. This is fantastic for us and I am sure the girls will love their hot lunches. Thanks to Ms. Hennelly, our Home School teacher for applying for and securing this for us.
Merry Christmas to everyone, stay safe and have a peaceful and enjoyable break.
Barbara Hanamy
School Principal
We wish you all a peaceful Christmas and New Year.
School closes Wednesday 22nd December at 12.15 p.m.
Re-opening on Thursday 6th January 2022.
Le gach dea ghuí í gcomhair na Nollag agus na hAthbhliana.
Junior and Senior Infants
The excitement is at fever pitch and the countdown is definitely on in the Junior and Senior Infant room as we prepare for Christmas. The girls add candles to their advent wreaths every week as the big day is fast approaching. The girls have been busy learning about the Post Office, writing Christmas cards, affixing stamps and posting their letters.
They are also busy in Santa’s workshop making toys, preparing tea for the elves, decorating Christmas trees and wrapping presents.
Earlier they learned about construction and designed their own homes. We had a wonderful zoom with architect Kieran Hoctor, where they had great fun learning about the role of an engineer and they designed structures with spaghetti and marshmallows.
The girls also learned about the restaurant and are looking forward to making reservations for their upcoming outings!
The girls have completed six weeks of athletics with Andrea and enjoyed it very much. They are now busy learning soccer skills with Ms. Byrne!
Wishing you all a happy and safe Christmas holiday!
1st Class:
First class have been super busy this term, working hard on counting in 2s, 5s and 10s, adding doubles, ag foghlaim dánta as Gaeilge, and using pop its to help us sound out words in our writing. We’ve recently been learning about the Arctic and Antarctic and focused our interest on penguins and polar bears – we learned lots of new and interesting facts about them. We worked on procedural writing and wrote lots of ‘how to’ including ‘How to make hot chocolate’….. so obviously we had to have a hot chocolate afternoon. We made scratch art and Christmas cards and we even discovered how to make fake snow…. 3 different ways! For Science Week we explored magnetism, made secret messages using lemon juice, made play dough, explored static electricity using balloons and made paper helicopters. We hosted a virtual Toy Show with 5th class which was so much fun, we loved chatting and joking with Ms. Murphy and all her girls. We loved athletics and soccer – and cannot wait to have more soccer after Christmas. On that note Nollaig Shona daoibh go léir ó rang 1.
2nd Class:
Second class have had a very busy term! We have loved Athletics with Andrea and Futsal with Gary and are looking forward to more in the New Year! We have been writing stories using our ‘Story Mountain’ and read stories over Zoom with Birr Library. We have investigated chocolate, created loads of Christmas art and learned all about how magnets work. We have worked so hard in so many subjects and are looking forward to a well-earned break. Happy Christmas from Second Class.
3rd Class:
What a busy term we ‘ve had in 3rd Class. We took part in the MS Readathon and we raised a huge sum of money for such a worthy cause! Well done to all our girls – you read a massive amount of books. We thoroughly enjoyed Science Week this year and especially loved creating our very own erupting volcano, using bread soda, vinegar, acids and bases. We developed our engineering skills by taking part in the Steps Young Engineers Award. We brainstormed magnificent ideas; drew our designs; made, tested and evaluated our prototypes and presented our projects to local Engineer Kieran Hoctor. A huge thank you to Kieran for giving of his time, expertise and encouragement. We look forward to seeing our creative designs developed in the future. Keep an eye out for the Flexible Couch, the All-weather Trampoline and the Lucky Lockers. We are really enjoying our in-class preparations for Christmas with some wonderful artwork on display in our class. We have been working on our musical skills too and are very proud of our renditions of Jingle Bells and Jolly Saint Nicholas on the tin whistle.
We wish everyone a very happy Christmas and look forward to lots more learning, creating and growing in 3rd Class in 2022.
4th Class:
The last few weeks have been very busy for Fourth Class. Here’s just a snippet of what they have been learning. The girls enjoyed reading about the adventures of Tuffy in The Diary of a Killer Cat, they explored Procedural writing and they were also very excited to meet authors David Walliams, Debbie Thomas and Judi Curtin who encouraged the children to continue to read as much as they can, every single day. In Maths the children have been learning about Time, Money, Graphs, Multiplication and Division. They are improving their Tables every day. Keep up the good work girls! They celebrated Space Week and Science Week in November and they very recently took part in The Young Engineers Award Project. In teams they planned, designed, built, tested and evaluated their prototypes. They got to present their projects to local engineer Mr. Kieran Hoctor who was impressed by their designs and they finished off the project in style by attending the STEPS Student Christmas Party Extravaganza.
The girls learned the skills of Futsal, Tag Rugby and Athletics for PE this term and they completed a series of LifeSkills lessons with Mairead from School Completion.
And now the countdown to Christmas in on… their Team Hope Christmas Shoe boxes have been delivered, the Christmas cards are designed for their Secret Santa, beautiful artwork decorates the classroom walls and windows, they’re playing Christmas tunes on the tin whistles and dancing to their favourite songs, they are enjoying Christmas activities, books and poems, the Nativity story was read and the class visited the church crib, they watched the Helix Panto, enjoyed storytime with the local library and even caught a glimpse of Santa!!! What a term! I hope you all enjoyed it as much as I did. Have a wonderful, safe and happy Christmas and best wishes for 2022.
5th Class:
It’s Christmasssss!
Wow! What a busy term this has been. We are not sure who has been working harder? The elves in Santa’s workshop….. or us upstairs in 5th Class ? your guess is as good as ours. We have been learning all about the famine in history and really enjoyed it. In maths we have been practising our long division and doing lots of fractions and decimal solving (we deserve our Christmas break to rest our brains).
This term we have particularly enjoyed all of our outdoor sport activities, tennis, tag rugby, athletics and futsal, big shout outs to Dermot, Denis, Andrea and Gary for all their excellent coaching skills. We had great fun.
The Christmas build up has been amazing, all of the festive art work, our Christmas song countdown, our virtual toy show with 1st Class and our pj day…. Slippers in school…. Ahh bliss.
Time to “wrap” this up… see what we did there??? All that is left to say is.. have a happy, healthy and safe Christmas everyone from all of us here in 5th class and Ms. Murphy. Here is one of our positive affirmations to remember during Christmas.
It is not about what is under the Christmas tree…. But WHO is around the Christmas tree that really matters.
Ms. Murphy and 5th class xxx
6th Class:
Rang 6 would firstly like to wish everyone in our community a happy and healthy Christmas and a FANTASTIC New Year!!
We have had a brilliant time this year and look forward to many more next year in our final few months of primary school….eeeek!!
We have been so busy up here learning new things across the curriculum. We have had time for some fun too. 6th class got to take part in rugby, athletics and futsal soccer this term. We are fighting fit after it all and want to thank the 3 coaches: DENIS, ANDREA AND GARY for teaching us so many new skills and letting us have a great laugh at the same time.
How lucky are we to have had the chance to learn how to sew this term with Mrs. Murray?! Even Ms. Treacy learned how to back-stitch! We made some lovely Christmas trees and very ‘on trend’ Facemasks. Keep an eye out on the Facebook page for the finished products. We’re not taking orders at the minute…but…if the right offer was made, we’ll take it into consideration!! Haha.
Sea Shanty was the theme of a couple of our music lessons!! We wrote our own and are in talks with a record label about signing us….WATCH THIS SPACE.
We were ‘exposed’ to new tastes and textures during a ‘Taste challenge’ during ‘Bia’ week. Now…we love food up here in 6th…but some of the things we blind tested will most definitely not be making it on to our Christmas Dinner plate….Olives! Dates! Beetroot! We’re lucky to be alive. We did get chocolate, strawberries and pineapple to name but a few more so we forgive our teacher….this time.
We are currently in the middle of Mercy’s Fittest Family – 6th class version. We have planked, did the hang tough, balanced on one foot and challenged gravity! Wow! Some of the tasks have been way harder than they look. With some ammmmazing individual performances and super team effort, we are having a blast.
Garda Grace Heffernan asked us to make a video for the residents in Birr Community Hospital. We put on the Christmas jumpers and made our way around the town stopping at some of the beautiful Christmas decorations and window displays that our town has. We will be posting this video to our SeeSaw and we really hope all the residents like the virtual trip around town.
I for one am looking forward to the Christmas holidays and hope to spend time with friends and family and sleep!! We have had a brilliant term up here in 6th and I have enjoyed every minute of it with this bunch of great girls. Wishing you all a peaceful and healthy Christmas.
See you all in 2022 please God!
Richelle Treacy
Mrs. Murray’s Class:
We have been counting down the days to Christmas since December 1st. Our two little girls are working on numbers 1 – 25 – forwards and backwards. We’ve been focussing on babies too – Baby Jesus in particular! All of the girls in our class spend time in their age appropriate classes – from a little to a lot. We are working very hard and thoroughly enjoying school.
The highlight of our term has been sports coaching with Ms. Lynch from Offaly Sports Partnership – aka The Fun Girl!
Mrs. Murray’s class wishes you all a very happy, safe, peaceful and Fun Christmas.