22nd June 2020 - Email to all families: It's the last week of term!

Good morning!
It's the last week of term. We made it!


Get engaged

• For this last week, try to do at least one school-related activity each day and to send one school-related activity to your teacher during the week. The teachers commit to responding to anything sent in by 11am on Friday. Anything sent after that may not get responded to. Teachers will be archiving their Seesaw classes on Friday afternoon and will not be on Seesaw over the summer break.
• This week, we will celebrate the graduation of the first class group ever to attend our school from Junior Infants right up to 6th class. Please join in the virtual guard of honour if you haven't already done that!
• There were two whole-school activities last week on Seesaw - say hi to your new teacher and celebrate your achievements this term. If you haven't done those yet, go ahead and do them now.
• And this week is the second and final week of Active Fortnight. We would love to see photos of you being active so do send them in!
• Finally, our Parents Association are still collecting photos for our My School Rocks! project so do send in photos if you haven't so far.

If we were in the school building this week, we would be celebrating a good year's work, packing up our work spaces and doing fun activities. You can do the same! Celebrate your achievements this term, re-assign the space you've been using for school work and do something fun together!


Planning for the next school year
Unfortunately, the Department of Education (DES) has still issued no instructions, guidelines or clarifications on what school will look like after the summer break and so we can't give you clarity either. 
Both Board of Management and staff are set up and ready to work with whatever DES sends out. The Parents Association have been in regular contact during school closures and we know they are ready to plan once guidelines are issued also.
Staff will be taking a break from this Friday 26th June up to 3rd August for those involved in providing Summer Provision and up to 10th August for others. Assuming clear guidance does not come early this week, we expect to have plans for the reopening worked out by 14th August and will be in touch then about those.
We will be making some amendments to the book lists this week. The list of books is not changing and the amount payable to the school is not changing. However, we are considering other items such as:

• In order to comply with cleaning, rotation and pod routines, we imagine that we will be taking the children outside to play regardless of weather and so we are suggesting that children have wellies and wet gear at school; you may like to have a separate set of these just for school and leave them in school.
• In order to reduce the sharing of items, we are suggesting that children in Infant classes each have their own pencil case. 
• All children should bring this year's workbooks into school on the first day of school. They will be very useful for teachers in assessing where the children are at and in covering areas of the curriculum that were not covered this year. Please keep the books you collected from the school.

Parents of children who will be in Infant classes, please note that there are workbooks on the book list for Infants for the first time. We added these as we think they will help in the event of further school building closures.


I will be in touch again towards the end of the week.
Have a great week, the final week of term!
Caitriona.