Horseleap N.S.

Air dry clay ornaments from the Junior Room Junior Room Christmas Stars Christmas lanterns from the Junior Room Rudolph by the Junior Room Oil Pastel picture of the Nativity Some Christmas prints from the Senior Room:

Thank you to Ann Marie, librarian at Kilbeggan Library, who invited us to visit on 9th December. The library has been recently refurbished so the children had an opportunity to relax in the sensory spaces, browse through some Christmas books and see all the facilities available in the library. There are always lots of free activities for children from chess to Lego to art and crafts. Here is the link if you would like to join the library: https://westmeath.spydus.ie/cgi-bin/spydus.exe/MSGTRN/WPAC/JOIN

Thank you to Ann Marie from Crann, an organisation which promotes trees, who visited our school on Monday, 8th December. She spoke to us about the important relationship that people have with trees and we planted two trees behind the school.

Senior Room pupils with Christmas art Thank you to all the children who wore their Christmas jumpers to school on 5th December and raised 200 euro for St. Vincent De Paul, Clara!

Our Lego Spike kits have finally arrived! We are grateful to be part of the BRICS project in conjunction with Athlone Education Centre, Oide and DCU. The pupils in the Senior Room will create Lego models and build a code to programme them to become robots. You can read more about the project here: https://www.oidetechnologyineducation.ie/brics-project/

Welcome back to our GAA coach Alan who put the pupils of Horseleap through their paces on Wednesday morning.

The pupils of Horseleap surpassed themselves this year with their wonderful Halloween costumes! Congratulations to our two pupils who received awards for full attendance during September and October. Congratulations to Johnny on his retirement as caretaker of Horseleap N.S. after many years of service. Well done to all the pupils who participated in the Tag Rugby Blitz in Moate on Thursday.

The children in Junior Infants to 2nd Class enjoy a range of Maths activities every day.

Thank you to Avril from Midland Warriors who visited our school on Monday to begin our tag rugby sessions for this year. Mini rugby training takes place every Sunday at the new grounds in Moate. Contact Avril on the number below for more information.

Today we welcomed Dr. John Dunbar to our school. John is a zoologist and owner of the Midlands Bug and Reptile Zoo. He introduced us to a variety of creatures. Among them were pythons, tarantulas, millipedes, cockroaches, scorpions and geckos.

We arrived back to find the apples trees in our mini orchard abundant with fruit! Our school garden - exactly as we prepared it to be ready for us in Autumn! In the Senior Room, we made origami bookmarks to use during our daily DEAR (Drop Everything And Read) time.

What a wonderful school tour we had on the shores of Lough Ree today! The children enjoyed a range of activities from kayaking to water slides, water fights to gladiator challenge, ziplining and climbing wall. The sun shone on us as we learned how to kayak, completed an obstacle course through the forest and enjoyed the beautiful surroundings of Portlick Scout Camp. Learning how to kayak Water fight! Gladiator Fight Swingball