Cregmore National School

Christmas Hits 2016!

Each pupil throughout the school, recently enjoyed participating in our Christmas productions. A series of 3 plays took place throughout Wednesday, 14th December. A wonderful time was had by all. Well done to all the boys and girls. You were great!

Twinkle Twinkle Christmas Star!

An Infant pupil prepares to place the star on the top of the Christmas tree.

Christopher Pop-In-Kins

We recently welcomed the arrival of Santa's elf Christopher Pop-In-Kins. We enjoyed sharing his story and spreading his good news. Christopher will return to the North Pole just before Christmas Eve.

Celebrating Advent

Throughout the last few weeks, we have enjoyed preparing for the Birthday of Jesus. This special time is called Advent. Our sacred spaces reflect the liturgical season of Advent.

Picture Perfect!!

Pupils recently enjoyed participating in an art lesson that involved drawing a self-portrait. Check out the results below!

Remembrance Tree

For the month of November we remembered our loved ones who have passed away.

Each child placed a leaf with the name of a loved one on our remembrance tree.

We also created a Garden of Remembrance to recall our loved ones.

Winter Wonderland Art and Poetry

The magnificent colours of Autumn have given way to the cold chill of Winter and children of Cregmore National school painted beautiful art and composed poetry to reflect this change in season.
Although there is no doubt we will miss the vivid, vibrant colours in the last season, the children's art and poetry below capture the peace, reflection and beauty we can all find during Winter!

The children's 'Winter Wonderland' art involved a few steps:

The children firstly learned about creating the cool colours of Winter using the colours blue, green, black and white. After teacher demonstration, they learned that adding white in small amounts to a colour can make it lighter . They also learned that adding a very tiny amount of black can make a colour darker!
They drew lines on a sheet of paper to ensure they remembered to create a different shade on each line.
Each child had fun experimenting with different shades of blue and green.
They left the bottom section of their art free to create the illusion of snow and when the paint was dry, they painted black, bare tree.

Poetry Writing

Once we completed this activity, the children were eager to experimented further with mixing colours to create different shades of purple which also highlights the cool winter landscapes we see at this time of year.
Following the art lesson, the children listened and responded to winter poetry which gave them lots of winter vocabulary to use in their own poems.
After a brainstorm of interesting adjectives, verbs and nouns to use in their poems as well as teacher modelling writing her own poem, the children composed the first draft of their poem in their poetry copies.
After editing their first draft, the final version was presented on a special winter sheet. We hope you like the display of their poetry below.

Viking Art!

The history of the Vikings was a topic of enormous interest for the children of Third class! They thoroughly enjoyed hearing about the vikings in books, websites and presentations on the interactive whiteboard. One very interesting fact they learned is that the Vikings set foot in America long before Christopher Columbus (the man famous for it's discovery) was there!

Here are some other interesting facts they learned about the vikings:

The Vikings were people from Scandinavia. Today, these countries are known as Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Around 400 AD, they began to make frequent raids by boat into Europe, even going into the Mediterranean Sea and raiding Sicily and southern Italy.
The Vikings were very good sailors. They built boats that were very long and narrow. They were called longships or dragonships, because they had giant wood carvings of dragons that were displayed at the front of the boat. The dragon was used so that people would be frightened. Each longboat could carry over 100 people.
Many people think of the Vikings as always wearing big helmets with horns. Actually, there was one Viking helmet found in Norway, and it didn’t have any horns..
Leif Erickson was one of the important Viking leaders. He was the one that led the Viking sailors over to the land now known as America

Third Class created the beautiful longboats below after hearing about the exciting journeys the vikings made all over the world! The boats involved a few steps:

First, they painted the sea background using a blue, green and white colours! Sponges were used to create the effect of the sea.
Secondly, they created their boats using paper and colouring pencils. They ships have a distinctive shape which we see below. The children also drew circles to create the shields the viking warriors attached to the sides of their boats.
The final stage involved sticking the boats together! We hope you like them!