Christmas Newsletter 2024
Mercy Primary School
Christmas Newsletter 2024
Welcome to our Christmas Newsletter 2024. The staff and students of Mercy Primary School have had an excellent term.
Parents – thank you for your support – working together makes our school community a great one. The super staff of Mercy Primary – well done and have a great Christmas.
Merry Christmas to everyone, stay safe and have a peaceful and enjoyable break.
Barbara Hanamy
Principal
Now a look at what has been happening in the classrooms
Junior Infants:
Happy Christmas! We have had a great half term with lots of fun and learning throughout. Our Aistear themes were Homes and Houses, The Post Office and Santa’s Workshop. We enjoyed a brilliant show in Birr Theatre called ‘Santa and the Three Little Pigs. We visited the Post Office to post our Christmas cards and we looked at all the lovely shop window displays in our town. We enjoyed Christmas Buddy Reading with 6th class and visited the church to practise for our Christmas carol service. We enjoyed performing for our families and friends. Mrs. Hanamy read a special Christmas story for us and Santa Claus came to visit us in the hall where we got a lovely Christmas selection box. Junior Infants have been super! Wishing you a relaxing and enjoyable holiday with your families and friends. Best wishes for 2025!!
Senior Infants Term 1.
We have had a brilliant first term here in Senior Infants. We have been learning so much and having so much fun every day. We love school.
Every day we are reading and writing more and more. We have started doing UFLI to help us with our phonics and UFLI the Unicorn is in our room every day keeping an eye on us as we work. We are turning into serious Mathematicians and our counting skills are very impressive.
It has been a particularly exciting month here in Senior Infants waiting on Santa’s visit. We have reason to believe he even popped by our classroom to check in on us and left a trail of magic dust and a Tootle for our class telling us to keep up the good work. We hear you Santa!!
We were lucky enough to go to Birr Theatre with our pals in Junior Infants to see a production of Santa Claus and the 3 little pigs. We had a brilliant time and laughed and laughed.
We went on a special trip to the Post Office where all the lovely staff there were so helpful. We posted some very important cards for our classmates and then had a lovely stroll around the town checking out all the lovely Christmas decorations people have put up.
The whole school are really in the Christmas spirit. You should see all the decorations in our room and in the hallway. It feels so special and we are so excited to see everyone on Wednesday at the Carol service. We don’t mean to boast but Juniors and Seniors are so talented and definitely have the cute factor. Don’t miss out on seeing us.
From all of us…to all of you… HAPPPPPPPY CHRISTMAS!! See you all next year.
1st Class and 2nd Class First and Second Class have been working very hard this term. In November we learned all about the signs of Winter, and we went on a frosty winter walk in the park to spot as many signs as we could. We had to wrap up very warm! We also learned all about houses around the world in countries like Thailand, Switzerland and Tanzania, and we created floor plans of our own homes here in Ireland. We read the story of Oisín in Tír na nÓg and drew pictures of what we imagined Tír na nÓg would look like. In Art, we constructed 3D fairy houses, shape penguins, and glittery snowflakes, and we painted snowy winter houses and beautiful winter trees. We explored how penguins’ feathers are waterproof in Science using crayons and water. Did you know that penguins produce oil that makes their feathers waxy, just like crayons? We also investigated how magnets work and what materials they work through. The girls completed lovely, imaginative recount writing pieces based on the short film ‘Bubbles’, about a little girl who floats away on a magical adventure. In December, we started counting down the days to the holidays with our class advent calendars. We learned about games that people played in the past and games played in other countries, and also about holidays celebrated at this time of year, like Christmas and Hanukkah. Finally, we have been working extremely hard in the last couple of weeks to learn our songs for our Christmas Carol Service. We definitely deserve a break over the holidays! Happy Christmas from everyone in First and Second Class!
3rd Class:
Nollaig Shona daoibh!
We have been very busy in Rang 3 and are delighted with the fantastic work we have accomplished since the start of the year. It has been so fun learning with one another and being part of the magical Christmas activities that we have enjoyed so very much.
We had great fun making lots of Christmas art – we really tapped into our creativity as we got into the festive spirit. We also learned about different Christmas traditions around the world. We are learning about how people celebrate Christmas in Australia, Brazil, Spain and Germany.
The children completed projects on different countries around the world. They all put a huge effort into their projects and they really were so informative and amazing. Well done everyone, great job!
The children have been learning their Christmas songs and are looking forward to the Carol Service in the Church.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from all in Third Class.
4th Class: The HOLIDAYS ARE COMING … Holidays are coming!! We are so full of festive cheer on this lead up to Christmas break. We have been as busy as Santa’s Elves in the workshop lately, working hard in all our subjects. In Maths we have enjoyed learning about data and drawing some cool bar charts, and recently have been tackling lots of tricky multiplication sums. Our time spent learning our times tables is paying off big time! In Gaeilge, we have learned all about our homes and the different rooms – ‘Sa Bhaile ‘was a fun topic. More recently, we have been practising our foclóir Nollaig. We are loving our class novel ‘Georges Marvellous Medicine’. Grandma’s character is causing a lot of laughter in our classroom! We started Tag Rugby with Laura and are very excited to continue this after Christmas. Monday mornings are always fun with Gregory’s music lessons. It’s a great start to the week. We also took part in a really fun workshop down in the Marian Hall with graduate architects working with ‘The Growery’. Our ideas have been considered for the new design of the community garden in Birr. We are so looking forward to seeing what will happen in the new one. Our Christmas Carol Service in the Church; one word – magical. It has been such a super way to create the Christmas cheer and buzz leading up to the holidays. We practised our songs and actions to be sure to make that carol service a special one. We want to wish everyone far and near a warm, safe and wholesome Christmas filled with love and laughter. See you all in the New Year. Lots of love Ms. Murphy & 4th class Busy Bees
5th Class:
We had a very busy term in 5th class. In Maths, we covered lots of topics, including decimals and fractions and also how to recognise and draw lots of different types of angles. We have nearly finished our very important Stay Safe Programme. We continued to enjoy our Music Generation lessons with Gregory, where we learned a lovely but quite tricky One Direction song! We did some lovely Art this term also. We made collages, did charcoal drawing, painted winter scenes and made some colourful Christmas cards. We started Tag Rugby with Laura where we learned lots of new skills. We will continue this after Christmas. We did a very interesting project on Clean Air Week. This year, the focus is on Engine Idling, which means leaving your car running while it is parked. This is very bad for the environment and costs a lot of money! In SESE, we travelled across the world and back in time as we learned about and did projects on Italy, the Aztecs, the counties of Ireland, what planet Earth is made up of, the digestive system and much, much more. We also learned how to create our own coat of arms. One of our more inspirational projects was ‘Women who have changed the world through the ages’. We finished our class novel ‘Matilda’. We met lots of interesting new characters and are glad Ms Trunchbull isn’t the principal of Mercy Primary! We attended a workshop in the Marian Hall where we all contributed our ideas towards the creation of a new community garden in Birr. Wouldn’t that be lovely. We visited the Christmas market in St. Brendan’s Community School. The pupils put in lots of work and we brought a little money to treat ourselves to something nice. Birr Library invited us to sing Christmas Carols with 4th and 6th class and that was a wonderful experience. While preparing for our Carol Service, we learned some Christmas tunes on the tin whistle. We did lots of reading in both Irish and English. D’Fhoghlaim muid go leor Gaeilge I mbliana. We learned a lot of Irish this year and lots of new words all about An Nollag. We have worked very hard in class and we loved our Just Dance breaks between subjects. We are all looking forward to a rest over the holiday season.
6th Class:
As the holiday season approaches, we’re excited to share all the fun, festive activities we have done over the last two months.
We were thrilled to attend the book launch of ‘Uniting Generations – The Centenary Celebration of Offaly’s Hurling Champions’ a compilation of the children’s poems and art work based on the 1924 All-Ireland Junior Hurling final. Each child received a copy of the book – a fabulous book to treasure.
Miss Hoare finished her teaching practise this term. She provided very engaging and enjoyable lessons for the girls and we wish her all the best in her studies.
A massive well done to all the girls in 6th Class who took part in this year’s MS Readathon. And a big thank you to all who sponsored them. For the last six weeks the girls have been reading lots of books, greatly improving their literacy skills as well as raising money to support people living with MS.
The girls are enjoying the weekly Transfer Programme sessions with Rachel from School Completion and these will continue after Christmas. Sixth Class students from Mercy, St. Brendan’s and Oxmantown joined together for a Treasure Hunt this term. They had great fun solving riddles and looking for clues around the town. Thanks to SCP for organising.
Our students took a trip to St. Brendan’s Community School to enjoy Rock of Ages – Teen Edition. It was a great show and lovely to see so many past pupils on stage. Well done to all the girls who took part in the poster competition and huge congratulations to Crina on winning a prize.
The Christmas Market at St. Brendan’s is always a highlight of the season! 6th Class visited the market recently where they browsed through the festive stalls, enjoyed seasonal treats and picked up special holiday gifts.
We teamed up with the students from 4th and 5th Class for Carol Singing in the local library. Our talented girls lead us in some traditional carols, Christmas songs and tin whistle tunes. It was the perfect way to get into the holiday mood. Our Carol Service was held in St. Brendan’s Church on the 18th December where the children told the Christmas story through music, readings and of course, singing! It was truly magical.
For each day of Advent, we have been counting down to Christmas with a special activity or surprise. The girls enjoyed odd shoes/ socks day, extra art activities, crazy hair day, PJ day, anything but a bag day… the girls loved opening their Advent calendar each day.
In the spirit of giving, our 6th Class students helped the infants with their Aistear activities and also read them lovely Christmas stories. It was lovely to see the students work together to create magical holiday memories and support each other in their learning. It’s a wonderful way to show kindness and teamwork this season.
Wishing you all a happy and peaceful Christmas.
Ms. Teehan’s Class:
We have had a very busy term in Ms. Teehan’s class. Like all of the other classes we’ve been super busy preparing for the Carol Service and we’ve thoroughly enjoyed learning our Christmas songs. In the midst of all the practising we have been visiting the library and even spent some time in their fabulous sensory room – we were so relaxed we didn’t want to leave. We borrowed some lovely books to read back at school too.
We experimented with different recipes to make fake snow and things got a bit crazy with a snowball fight – after we built some snowmen of course. We were also lucky enough to have Mrs. Hanamy read some Christmas stories in our class which the girls all really enjoyed. We’ve been having fun creating Christmas art and displaying it, decorating Christmas trees and our own classroom. We can’t wait for Christmas and wish you all a healthy and happy Christmas and New Year.
Green Schools
Clean Air Week (CAW) ran from November 25th – 29th 2024. Students from 5th Class learned facts, figures and completed some fun activities and they created a lovely display on our Green Schools Notice Board. They helped promote clean air in our school and our community by sharing their projects and telling classes about saving fuel, zero emissions, no idling – reduce your emissions by turning off the ignition. They also designed lovely informative CAW posters for the school. Well done Fifth Class.
Recycling Batteries – Reminder: You can recycle your old batteries in our school. Each class has a WEEE Ireland Blue Battery box. Simply bag them up and take them into school. Always remember to recycle safely!
St. Vincent de Paul Food Appeal: A huge thank you to all who donated to our Christmas Trolley Food Collection.
Wishing all our Green Schools committee members a very happy Christmas.
We wish you all a peaceful Christmas and New Year.
Le gach dea ghuí í gcomhair na Nollag agus na hAthbhliana.
School closes Friday 20th December at 12.15
Re-opening on Monday 6th January 2025