Junior Infants have spent lots of time working on their counting. They have to put the correct number of bears at each picnic table 🧸🧺

We were very fortunate to receive 5 refurbished laptops from EY Ireland this week! Josephine Fitzgerald and her two sons presented our school with the laptops on behalf of EY! We cannot wait to start using them to do lots of research and different projects! 

6th Class are also partaking in the Dell Vex Robotics Project this year. Though this was postponed by the organisers until later in the year, we are still working hard on the project. We started this project in October side-by-side with our IFIM Project. We halved our class into one Miecraft Team for the IFIM Project and one Robotics team, and we swapped over each week which meant that we all got the chance to work on both projects. We took a long time to put the playing area together and then started on building the robot in the halla.

The robot was very small and intricate so we decided to build the rest of it in class , this took a long time as some of the pieces were so small and there were some problems we had to fix. Other members of the group built the obstacles on the track which the robot will have to navigate around. When the project was postponed until May/June we decided to pause the project as we were very busy with the IFIM Project. We have now returned to this project and are currently working on programming it to move around and do the tasks we need it to do for the 'Pitching In' Challenge. Programming is difficult but we are making progress and look forward to the competition date being announced! We loved this project and we learned lots about building the robot, the different mechanical pieces needed to make it move and now coding and programming it!

Muireann Donelon (on behalf of 6th Class)

We started our Ireland's Future Is Mine (IFIM) Project in October of last year. This project is about creating a digital model of your local village using Minecraft Education Edition before studying sustainability and biodiversity and then making changes to your online village to show what we imagined our future Castlemahon village would look like! We used our teacher's laptop to host the online 'world' we were building and we used the school ipads to log into this world. This meant that we could all log in together at the same time and co-operate and work on our world together. We worked together in stages to build houses, roads, footpaths, lamposts and all the physical infrastructure of our village. This took a long time but we really enjoyed it and really looked forward to it each week.

After watching the Dreamspace episodes and learning about coding etc we then studied about climate change, sustainability and biodiversity in our Science classes. We brainstormed and came up with ideas to make our village more sustainable...

• We transformed an abandoned factory into a community owned Textile Recycling Plant.
• We used the river to generate hydro-electric power using an under-water turbine.
• We transformed an old dis-used Car Park into a beautiful Eco Park.
• We created a community crop garden for members to rent a space at low cost and grow their own vegetables
• We created a bike rental hub.
• We added clothes and bottle banks for recycling.
• We used another dis-used parking area in the village to create a playground and open market stall area and linked this via a footbridge over the river to the Eco-Park.
• We placed solar panels on each roof and lamp post and built wind turbines at the edge of the village.
• We provided electric car charging spaces in the village and in the school staff car park and built a bus stop in the village.

We had so much fun doing this project and we are very proud of how it turned out! We learned so much about coding and working as a team in a digital space. We hope you like the video of our finished imagined Castlemahon village of the future!

Dillon Cremin & Kate O'Riordan (on behalf of 6th Class)

4th class were very creative in the designs for their wind powered cars. As well as the STEM issues that arose during construction of the vehicles, environmental factors such as weather and road surface had to be considered also. A lot of thought went into problem solving and trouble shooting.

We also had to be accurate in measuring the distances travelled by each team so we had our

 "Measurers" and our "checkers" (who confirmed the measurements).

After the races, we spent time creating graphs to represent the distances travelled.

We had a visit from Lismore Heritage Centre for our STEM Showcase 🧪

We learned all about static electricity 🎈

They taught us all about acids and bases and chemical reactions 🧪

We made our own rocket ship 🚀 and we were really excited to make our volcanoes 🌋

Thanks to our wonderful teachers for organising a great day 💚

Earlier on this year 4th class groups made cardboard marble runs as part of an investigation into energy and forces in science. The results were brilliant!

The science roadshow called into 4th class and did SHOCKING SCIENCE with us. We learned about all aspects of electricity. We actively learned how circuits are made, how electricity is made, ways to make static electricity and got hands on making circuits.

We had great fun and learned lots!

We followed in the footsteps of the great Irish Explorer Tom Crean. We learnt all about the animals that lived in Antarctica. We dressed up like Tom Crean. We measured the temperature of ice and discovered  how blubber protects animals from the cold in Antarctica. 

4th class students were busy making paper playgrounds. There was lots of planning and design, construction and problem-solving involved before they completed amazing structures.

Well done 4th class!

Senior Infants had a great day exploring and discovering new things with Aoife during this STEM showcase.During the workshop we discussed and tested acids and bases,made our own volcanoes, explored static electricity using balloons and mixed and made some chemical reactions! We all learned so much and certainly had great fun in the process! 🧫🔬🧪👩‍🔬👨‍🔬