Road Safety

This week two Gardaí visited us to talk about Road Safety. They showed us a PowerPoint presentation. Then they quizzed us on how much we had learned.

The main points we learned were:

• Stop, look and listen before you cross the road.
• When cycling, always wear your helmet.
• You have to be 150cm tall before you sit in the front seat of a car. (Being age 12 does not matter! You have to be 150cm tall!)
• We should tell everyone in the car to put on their seat belts - it's not rude to tell adults to do this.

Remember, there is only one person responsible for your own safety and that is YOU!

By Pádraig Kane, 6th class

Berlin Wall

The Berlin Wall

The Berlin Wall was both the physical division between West Berlin and East Germany from 1961 to 1989 and the symbolic boundary between Democracy and Communism during the Cold War.

This week we have been talking about the Berlin wall in memorial of its demolishing. The Berlin Wall was erected in the dead of night and for 28 years kept East Germans from fleeing to the West. Its destruction, which was nearly as instantaneous as its creation, was celebrated around the world.

At the end of World War II, the Allied powers divided conquered Germany into four zones, each occupied by either the United States, Great Britain, France, or the Soviet Union. The same was done with Germany's capital city, Berlin. I  brought in a piece of the Berlin wall from the west side (because there was only graffiti on the west side, not the east) It was very interesting.  

By Cian Maguire and Lorcan Keoghan, 6th class

The Aboriginal People

This week we were set a mini-project about the Aboriginal people. We discovered all sorts of interesting things about them. Here are a few facts on the Aboriginal people:

• The Aboriginal people have been living in Australia continuously for  40,000 to 50,000 years.
• Constitutional and legal changes have affected the rights of Aboriginal people - would you believe that they were not recognised as proper citizens of their own country until 1967, before that they were classified as native wildlife along with koalas and kangaroos?
• Every different tribe has their own language. (There were up to 500 aboriginal languages at one point.)
• They lived for many years before the white man came.
• They hunted with boomerangs.
• They had many sports: ~ Coreeda is a combination of Aboriginal dance with a unique wrestling game. ~ Battendi is an Aboriginal game set up to enhance both spear-throwers accuracy and distance.
• Aboriginal art is based on story-telling using symbols as an alternate method of writing down stories of cultural importance. This art has ensured the passing on of Aboriginal History.

By Sophie Brosnan 5th class

"Kes" by Lawrence Till

This week the Senior Room have been reading from "Kes" (an adaptation of "A Kestral for a Knave" by Barry Hines). Kes is the story of Billy Casper and his love of falconry. The play also tells of his difficult home life with his mother and older brother Jud.

I wrote this diary entry for Billy.

Hi my name is Billy. Tonight like every Saturday night I am in the company of nobody. Jud, my abusive brother is in the pub and I don't know exactly where my mother is but I have a fair idea - in the pub with Jud drinking like there is no tomorrow and soon to be back at her boyfriend Reg's house.
And here I am home alone waiting for Jud to come home with his mates and a woman most likely, and beat me around tossing me off the walls, taking the mick out of me and my interest in falconry. But it does not matter, my cuts, wounds and bruises heal quickly and I'll get my kestrel soon and I will have something to do every Saturday night.

by David King, 5th class

Creative Writing in the Senior Room

Recently we studied a poem in our class, "Me and Him" by Richard Edwards. In this poem we talked about elderly people and problems that some elderly people have.

Then we looked at a photograph of a pair of hands belonging to an old lady. I wrote this piece in response to this photograph.

Look at my hands

Look at my hands, they are old and wrinkly but they have been through so much.
First my hands held my new born baby brother.
They are the hands that wrote the exam that passed my Junior and Leaving certs.
These are also the hands that bore a wedding ring on my fourth finger on my left hand.
These are the hands that held the hands of my husband on his death bed.
These are the hands that held a bundle of joy that was my grand daughter.
These are the hands that soon will be wrapped in rosary beads as I lie dead.

by Cormac Kane 5th class

Hello and welcome to our first blog!

We're the pupils of the Senior Room, Dunsany N.S. and this is our very first BLOG!

We'll include here some of our creative writing, in-class projects, joint Junior-Senior Room projects and anything we think you'd like to read about or we'd like to share!

We've just completed two great projects on the Romans.
6th & 4th class worked together, with 5th class working alone. One of our 6th class pupils BF made this very impressive model of the Coloseum.

In other news, Pádraig has just been appointed captain to our school football team, which will play for the second year in a row in the county championships (Cumann na mBunscol competition) on 22 November 2014 in Pairc Táilteann, Navan. We won this competition outright last year.