Active School Week Round Up – Secondary School
Monday’s PoundFit classes had the whole school up on their feet and rocking out to some pumping music. The students had so much fun pretending they were in a rock band that they didn’t even realise that it was a fitness class!! The sun was shining all day long which made it so much more enjoyable. Huge thank you to Carla Roberts @movewithcarla for delivering three separate sessions in one day for our whole school.
On Tuesday, we had an online talk from Jacqui Hurley. Jacqui is a presenter, broadcaster and author. In February 2009, she became the first woman to present a sports show on RTÉ Radio when she began working on Sunday Sport, she is also a presenter and sports journalist on the 6.1 News on RTE. She has devised and produced sports documentaries, and has written the highly successful book, ‘Girls Play Too’, inspiring stories of Irish sportswomen. She is a former Irish Basketball and Cork Camogie star and has managed the Irish U16 Women’s Basketball Team. Jacqui’s talk was inspirational and was very engaging. The students had lots of questions at the end for her, which she was happy to answer.
Walk On Wednesday….. our whole school got active together today! We left the school grounds after break and took a lovely walk through UCD and Clonskeagh. Luckily the weather held out for us and we all completed almost 7km!
Friday ends our Active School Week with a fantastic Sports Day. The Senior School call their Sports Day ‘Jump For Joy’ and all proceeds from the generous donations from parents go to Our Lady’s Crumlin Children’s Hospital. This year, your donations will go directly to upgrading the Naz Ward. (Donations can still be accepted through EasyPayments on the school’s website) At the time of writing, our students are currently participating in their activities of Space Hopper races, an Obstacle Course, Human Xs & Os, a water challenge, different types of relays, target practise and Sticks (our long jump competition). The girls look fab all dressed up in their year themes – 1st yrs Toga Party, 2nd yrs The 80s, 3rd yrs The Wild West, TYs Hollywood Celebrities, 5th yrs Monochromatic Superheroes and 6th yrs, which they left to be a surprise on the day, UNDER THE SEA!
The final competition of the day was the staff vs 6th yr rounders. This is always the highly of the day for all students, not just the 6th years. We have very competitive seniors this year, but the staff have a secret competitive edge too! The 6th years finished the game with 21 points after 29 batters and the staff finished on 19 points with only 20 batters. The 6th years are calling it a win. This PE teacher will happily agree to a draw!! 
-Sandra Pye
Enjoy some of the highlights from the Secondary School here.
*Thank you very much to all that have contributed to our annual Active School Week fundraiser for Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital, Crumlin. This year your money will go towards the upgrading of the Naz Ward – the oldest baby ward in the hospital. To date we have raised €1260, but we can raise more! For those who may have missed first call, you can still make your contribution through the EasyPayments link here. Please scroll down to Jump For Joy to make your contribution.
Active School Week Round Up – Junior School
During Active Schools Week we wanted to get the students moving as much as possible so we started each morning of the week with some exercises. We were lucky enough to have some amazing volunteers from TY in the Secondary School come down and take each class to do some exercises for 3 minutes each day. The girls really seemed to enjoy these exercises and definitely appreciated that fact that it was some of their older peers there to run the exercises for them. On Friday rather than doing some traditional exercise the TYs had a playlist ready to go, borrowed a speaker and brought some dance moves with them and lead the charge in getting everyone moving to start the day.
Each day of the week there was also a 1 Km run for classes 1 to 6, each student could run/jog/walk for 1Km on a measured-out area during the school day. On Tuesday and Thursday Aled got the girls to do the 1Km run as part of their PE and the other days of the week the teachers ran the show. On Thursday there was also a visit from Pembroke Cricket Club coaches to run some activities showing the girls the basic skills of cricket and playing some ball games as well.
Big thanks to Aled and the teachers for making the week such a success.
-Dave Devereux