Distance Learning Zone&Twitter

Dear Parents/Guardians,

Two weeks have now passed since the closure of the school and I hope that you and your families continue to keep safe and well. Teachers from Scoil Mhuire have been working on updating their work advice sheets for next weeks closure and these will be available on the classes section of the school website www.scoilmhuiremountsackville.ie to-day. Teachers have been working hard and collaborating to develop online lessons for our pupils which they can view and complete tasks for in the Distance Learning zone in our classes section of school website. They can then submit pictures of their work to our new school twitter account @scoilmhuiremou1. Parents aren’t expected to recreate school at home so the lessons are devised just to help children engage with distance learning. I ask you to be patient as we are just at the beginning of this process so lessons will be added as they are completed for the different classes. We wanted it to go live today in the hope that it will be a help to our young pupils confined in their homes. These lessons are meant to be a help and are not compulsory. If your child completes suggested task from online lessons they are then encouraged to post a picture of it to our twitter account mentioned above. I want to thank all the teachers for their collaboration and hard work but especially Ms. Lawlor for using her IT skills to help start bring this initiative to fruition. Junior infants can use the class twitter account that Ms. Lawlor set up at the end of her online lessons while the rest of the school can use the school twitter account to submit work. 

We are aware that all homes may not have a laptop or an ipad available for the children to use at this time of parents having to work from home, so please accept that there is no pressure to complete this online work. The Distance learning zone is just an initiative that is aimed as an extra way of helping your children at home and also a way of staying connected. Just reading with or to your children daily  will not only develop their imaginations and literacy skills but will also help them to relax and feel less anxious in these difficult times. Engaging in practical maths activities such as weighing and measuring while cooking or allowing children to to play shop while using real coins/play money would also be of huge benefit to them. After seeing the wonderful maths activities from real life the children presented at maths week I am in no doubt that they will discover endless possibilities here. The children attending Scoil Mhuire are extremely creative and I would imagine we will be seeing pictures of creative play situations, real life maths activities, creative writing, science experiments, etc. shortly and I for one, am excited to see what the children come up with.

I hope that all our pupils will be safe and back in school soon. In the meantime as we embrace our new normality, I hope the online lessons that are being created and the links we are providing will be of benefit to you and your children. I have not been notified yet about any changes to the dates of first communion and confirmation but as soon as I have been informed I will let you know immediately. Take care of yourselves and each other in the coming weeks.

Kind Regards,

Ms. O’ Kelly