If you're going on a trip this mid-term break or in the future, have a look at our Holiday Tips for some educational ideas to keep your child engaged!
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From 1st December 2015, different people will sit on the Board of Management of the school. We are very efficient, having so far filled 6 of the 8 positions on the Board, in preparation for the hand-over. Patron nominees, appointed by Educate Together, will be:
As Principal, Caitriona Hand will remain on the Board. The incoming teacher nominee is Jenna Boland. Parent nominees, as elected at the parents' meeting on 20th October, will be:
The six elected members will now work to find two community nominees to join them on the Board of Management. Please see below for a brief presentation about the Board of Management. Please remember that the younger siblings of children in our school do NOT get priority when it comes to enrolment. Make sure each one of your children has been pre-enrolled for our school! The only criterion in our enrolment policy is first-come-first-served so the earlier you sign up, the better.
If you have any questions about the enrolment process or about the school, please contact us. As you know, we expect to move into our new wing in November. We are very excited about this. Our new wing will give us so many extra resources and spaces in our school and it will be absolutely wonderful!
One of the new rooms provided for us will be a school library. We are really looking forward to having one room in the school dedicated completely to reading and books! The clothes collection this month will go some way towards filling that room with books. But we are still a long way short. Bord Gais have a programme where they gift A FREE LIBRARY to schools, communities and charities. We would absolutely LOVE to be the recipient of such a prize. €1,500 worth of books would be AMAZING for us to get! Please nominate us for this amazing prize. Suggested responses to the questions are set out below to make this process even easier for you but please feel free to add your own thoughts on it. Name of nominated organisation: Citywest Educate Together National School Address: Fortunestown Lane, Citywest, Dublin 24. Website: www.citywestetns.ie Contact person in this organisation: Caitriona Hand Telephone: 01-4035906 Charity number: We're working on it! Is this organisation a community, voluntary or charitable one? Yes Is this a non-profit organisation? Yes Tell us a bit about this organisation: We are a new school, just opened three years, and already grown to over 200 pupils. 54% of our pupils have English as an additional language and, in January 2016, we are opening a special class for children with ASD so we are trying very hard to cater for the diverse needs of our community, providing equality-based education for the families of Citywest. Parental and community involvement is a priority for us:
Have you noticed the lovely display in our entrance hall? We've put it there because it's Maths Week, and we are focussing particularly on Maths at the school this week.  Maths Week is an opportunity for us to notice the Maths all around us - some of the Maths Eyes posters on our display help to point out how much Maths we walk past every day without thinking about it! Watch out for numbers, shapes and patterns at home or while out walking or driving. Encourage your child to count and figure things out.
In the classroom, we will be trying out lots of games involving Maths, as well as recognising how much Maths we use every day without even thinking about it! -Take a look at the Maths nature trail along the top of our display - even take some pictures of the items that are listed - and see can you and your child find everything while out for a walk! My goodness, what an eventful day we had on Tuesday! Our fire alarm kept going off. Each time it happened, we followed our emergency procedure, got out safely and Caitriona and Seamus Conboy, principal of Scoil Niamh CNS, inspected the building and could find no fire. Each time, we reset the alarm and called the company that takes care of our fire system, asking them to come and check it. After the third alarm, we thought we smelled smoke and so we evacuated again and called 112, requesting the fire service. Three fire brigades came to the school. The children were very safe, sitting in their designated collection points and waiting. The fire fighters assessed our building and decided that the alarm had indeed been going off because of a faulty sensor and that the smell of smoke had been caused by the use of a specialised, heavy-machinery saw being used in the building work. They declared the building safe and left the premises. Our fire system maintenance company came to the school within hours and fixed the fault. We are satisfied that we did the right thing. What is most important to us is keeping every child and staff member safe at our school. Thankfully, we had been practicing our fire drills and everyone knew exactly what to do. Caitriona and the teachers noticed that we were a bit noisy, however, and think we could get out quicker if we were more focussed and so we are putting a lot of work this week into getting it just right. It would be a tremendous help if parents and guardians could chat with their children about why its important to leave everything behind, to listen to the teacher extra carefully during an evacuation and to be quiet until the teachers have checked that everyone is safely out of the building! We also recommend that you prepare an evacuation plan for your home and that your children are clear on what they should do in the event of a fire in the home. Finally, this experience brought home to us how important the car park rules are. It is vitally important that our children can quickly and easily get to and stay in their allocated emergency collection points and it is vitally important that emergency services can access the site and get to the building as soon as possible. Please DO NOT drive into the staff car park, without gaining prior permission and instruction from Caitriona. And if you know anyone who uses our gate as a drop-off point for the LUAS, tell them to stop. There should be NO cars stopped at either Entrance gate or Exit gate. Our book on Positive Parenting has arrived at the school. If you would like to borrow the book, please call to the office and sign for it. We are asking that parents/guardians who borrow the book return it to the office within two weeks. Thank you.
Our Mad Hatter's Day was a phenomenal success - it served as a wonderful opportunity to showcase the creativity and innovation within our school community. Not to mention the fact that we raised a total of €294 on the day! Thank you so much to all families for their generous contributions. We are now setting about acquiring items that will help us to teach the children about world belief systems. Our main focus is the belief systems that are laid out within our Learn Together curriculum; i.e. Islam, Hindu, Sikhism, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Atheism, Agnosticism and Humanism. We have put together a list of items that we feel would be particularly useful and will shortly be sourcing as many of them as we can within the funds that were raised. With your help though, we hope to maximise the impact of this drive. Do you have any of the items that are listed below, that you could donate to the school? You would be making an invaluable contribution to the education of all of the children at Citywest, and by saving us buying that item, we would then be able to use the money towards another item. We would be very grateful for any donations - we know that you will dig deep as you always do! Thank you. Caitríona, Principal Aoife, Ethical Education Coordinator This is the first time our school is putting together a list of items for the teaching of belief systems and we would welcome your feedback. You, our families, are after all our experts on belief systems. Perhaps some items are not relevant to this kind of teaching and learning, maybe you can suggest some more suitable items? Any help or advice you can give us will be gratefully and sensitively received. All faiths
Islam
Sikhism The 5 K's: wooden comb, metal bracelet, cotton undergarments, curved sword, (uncut hair) Buddhism
Hindu
Judaism
Christianity
Humanism
Did you know that the people who work at Citywest Educate Together NS are not only helping others to learn but are also striving to learn more themselves and to develop in their roles as teachers, SNAs, secretary and cleaner-caretaker?! Just this term alone, we are attending courses on such a variety of areas as:
Phew! We don't stand still at all. We are always striving to develop professionally and also to share our learning with one another. Thanks to a Facebook competition, we have won a book called Positive Parenting by John Sharry of Solution Talk.
This book will be the first book that we will make available for parents to borrow from our school. We hope, over time, to grow a library of books and resources for parents to use as they progress on their parenting journey. Our teachers engage in continuous professional development - we are engaged in learning all the time and are constantly developing our knowledge and skills. We encourage parents to do the same. If you have any ideas or recommendations for our parenting library or if you have any resources to donate to such a library, please get in touch. |
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