We are working towards our first Active Flag this year. The Active Flag Committee are working hard to make sure that are keeping up with all the activities and tasks we have to do to be awarded an Active Flag. Sa chéad téarma we had a visit to the Oughterard Golf Club and the Committee led the school in a month of Active Breaks. We have set up an Active Flag notice board and the committee decided on a motto, “Don’t Quit, Get Fit!”
As part of our audit we were able to identify what we do well and what we need to work on. One thing that we do well is that we already focus on the Fundamental Movement Skills and cover most of the PE strands. Something we need to work on is to include Activity into our school celebrations so at Halloween we played some games that got everybody up and moving and for Science Week and Christmas we organised trails for the yard. We are trying to organise a visit to the Community Centre to try out Badminton and we are hoping to get a Dance Teacher in Term 2 to teach us a few moves! We will post photos and update you as we do some activities.
We got to try out some new things in Term 2 and kept up some of the things that worked well for us already. The Ardranganna get movement breaks throughout the day. These can be going for walks, little jogs or skips if that’s the FMS we are working on. We sometimes use different platforms on the web to to movement breaks aswell. It depends on the weather, which in Connemara is often wet and windy! Múinteoir Caitríona did yoga with both seomraí this term. We learned poses like Child’s Pose, Tree Pose and many more. As well as this, the Active School Committee led the school in some activities like soccer, bowling and basketball.
We took part in the “Road to Beijing” which meant we travelled virtually to Beijing with the Irish Winter Olympics Team. We had 20 days to cover over 11, 000km. We measured out laps of 720m and 300m and got moving and covered te distance! We did a whole school Toraíocht Taisce (Treasure Hunt) to celebrate Seachtain na Gaeilge and did the Climb with Charlie on the hill behind our school. That was a special day together.
For Term 3, we finally got to do the Dance classes with Gillian. She was such a good teacher and we really had so much fun participating in those classes. She picked all kinds of different music and taught us so many dance moves. We even got to do a bit of break-dancing! Seán Kelly came to coach football and we had some fun days outside with him learning lots of different skills, playing small-sided games and some whole class court games. The Active School Committee planned some brilliant activities for Active School’s Week. We played playground games, obstacle races and had a day’s dancing!! Rang 6 did such a good job planning and organising the activities. We even had no home-wrok and had to acctive home-work instead. What a week!!
Finally the Active Committee planned and organised the whole Sports Day. The organised running races and three-legged races which were so much fun. They organised stations where we did bowling, penalties and other fun activities. We had relay races; the dress-up relay and the water relay. Both of these were brilliant and finally they finished off with a tug-of-war. All in all, the committee did a brilliant job.
We definitely feel we are an Active School. We really enjoyed the experience and the Active Committee were super at planning and making sure we were keeping Active throughout the school. We hope we have done enough to be awarded the flag, and we have definitely got moving more throughout the year by being part of this process!
