Be-autiful Artwork

Have you spotted the wonderful new artwork on our walls outside? The 2nd class children made these colourful creations to promote positive mental health messages in our school. 

Be Creative, Be Happy, Be Kind and Be You

encapsulates everything we stand for here in SS Peter and Paul JNS.

The use of bright, vibrant colours to create these displays look especially effective against the black silhouette paintings Mrs Heffernan drew.  

The Student Council added their own colourful hand prints to the wall to set the scene.

We hope our students and parents enjoy walking past this wall every morning and strive every day to be creative, be happy, be kind and most importantly be you!!

Student Council

Here in SS Peter and Paul JNS, we value the thoughts and opinions of our students. We acknowledge that they are our future and are intelligent, imaginative individuals. Therefore we set up a school Student Council a number of years ago so that our students could have a voice as to how we can make our school a happier, more enjoyable place to be. Over the years, they have come up with fantastic ideas such as suggesting more activities on the yard, as well as helping to design our wonderful Sensory Corridor. (see here)

 The Student Council represent all class levels, from Junior Infants up to Second Class and each team will be rotated every two months so that all the classes are fully involved. 

 Our new Student Council for the months of March and April are;

Mya, Sam, Stephen, Jessica, Sean, Pavlina, Anna and Adomas

Congratulations to you all. 

        

Well done to you all for being chosen to represent your class. No doubt you will bring lots of great ideas and thoughts to help keep our school the happy, friendly place it is. 

Mindful Space

We have nearly finished our Mindful Space outside. When we asked the Second Classes to come up with some designs for our Wellness area outside, we got lots of rainbow inspired entries. This formed the basis of our Mindful Space.

A rainbow was painted and the inspirational quote "Be a Rainbow, in Someone Else's Cloud" added to the wall. A lovely reminder every morning as we walk past it, to always spread happiness and try bringing a bit of joy to someone's life, as you never know what troubles and worries they may have. To add a sensory dimension to the rainbow, the Student Council added coloured lids, collected by the children, to the wall. 

    

As we work our way through yet another lock down, we are all very conscience of our young people's mental health. They have missed out on so much over the past year, with lock down birthdays, not seeing their grandparents, sporting activities and missing out on play dates with their friends. It is not surprising therefore, that so many are bound to carry with them worries and anxiety issues that they might find difficult to express.  Looking through the 2nd class art entries, we found a lovely idea of a "Worry Monster", where you feed your worry to the worry monster. We love the idea of having a physical output for the children to express their feelings. 

We adapted this idea to tie in with our enchanted rainbow theme and made a "Worry Well", where the children could "Wish their worries away and Have a Great Day". The idea being that the children would whisper any worries they had into the well and the fairies, that are now living in our Enchanted Tree, would take their worries away. This idea has proven very popular with parents and children all visiting the Worry Well and vocalising how they're feeling. 

The children were delighted when they noticed that fairies had chosen to come and live at our school. Our chief fairy is called "Sparkles" (named by Féile, one of our Junior Infants) and over the weeks Sparkles has invited more and more of her friends to come and stay and listen to the children's worries and stories. 

We are delighted with how our Mindful Space has turned out. We hope it brings joy and happiness to all the children in our school as well as future children coming to our school.

Before

After