Active School

Physical Education is deemed a very important part of the curriculum here at St. Thomas’ J.N.S. All teachers, from Junior Infants to Second Class, are allocated over one hour per week to teach the different P.E. strands throughout the year- Games, Athletics, Outdoor and Adventure, Dance and Gymnastics. Aquatics is being taught this year using the Land PAWS lessons. Our school has an up-to-date P.E. plan and teachers use the PSSI lesson plans to guide their delivery of the P.E. curriculum, differentiating the lesson to the class they are teaching, ensuring each child is reaching his/her potential. The range of P.E. equipment in our hall is clearly labelled and accessible to teachers. The equipment is age appropriate for our junior school ranging from early start to second class. The equipment is updated yearly, to ensure that the curriculum can be delivered effectively. Each child’s progress in P.E is recorded and discussed with parents at Parent Teacher meetings throughout the school year, and is communicated through the end of year school report. To encourage the home-school link, children are given active homework on their P.E. day to promote being active!

Our Active School Committee.

Our Active School committee are always updating our notice board to reflect what we are focusing on at that particular time. Our pupils are encouraged to use our ‘ideas box’ for any suggestions they may have to make PE more fun. We have been working hard this year practising and developing our Fundamental Movement skills. You can have a look at these at the following link https://www.scoilnet.ie/pdst/physlit/fms-activities/

Our Active School Slogan.

Walk, jog or run- let’s go have some fun!

Priority PE Strand.
Our Staff received out of school CPD for the strand of Outdoor and Adventure. The focus was on our new Active walkway and in particular on the skill of orienteering. We have had huge enjoyment completing different tasks and activities with our classes.

As Outdoor and Adventure was our priority strand this year, all our pupils went on a park trip to help foster and develop skills in this area.

Physical Activity.

At St. Thomas’ we recognise the value of Physical Activity. We have lots of planned activities throughout the school day to get us moving and give our brains a power boost. Short physical activity breaks, such as Go Noodle, Cosmic Yoga and RTÉ’s 10 @10 are used on a regular basis in every classroom across the school. We provide twice daily playground breaks, encouraging children to actively take part in our zoned yard activities. We facilitate these activities by utilising sports equipment during our yard breaks, getting every child involved and reaching their essential 60 minutes of exercise a day. This year we have introduced ‘Feel Good Fridays’ at the end of each month where all classes participate in a different activity to get the body moving and heart pumping. All classes took part in a running initiative and a 4 week active break challenge.

Running initiative.
All our classes took part in the ‘Run Around Ireland’ initiative. We had so much fun keeping fit and learning about different landmarks around our beautiful country.

Active Break challenge.

All classes participated in a four-week active break challenge. If you would like to be active at home, why not view some of the links below:

10@10 https://rtejr.rte.ie/10at10/

Go noodle https://www.gonoodle.com/

Twigin Yoga https://rtejr.rte.ie/category/rtejr-blog/yoga/

120 non-contact physical activities: https://www.scoilnet.ie/pdst/120noncontactpe/

Cosmic Kids Yoga: https://www.cosmickids.com/

YouTube (movement breaks, kid bop, shake the sillies out etc.) or log into St. Thomas’ YouTube channel to complete some of the active videos from last year’s Active School Week.

Partnerships.

At St. Thomas’ we are extremely proud of all our pupils’ physical activity efforts and sporting achievements whether it is inside or outside of school life. We are aware of the many fantastic sporting partnerships and organisations in the wider community which support the development of sports within schools. Here at St. Thomas’ we are continuously building upon and developing these links which we have done so for the past 40 years. Each year we invite many of these agencies into our school to help develop pupil’s skills, abilities, knowledge and enjoyment of different sports. Inclusion of all pupils is particularly important to us in the school. As a result, we have sought support and advice in this area to ensure all children are included no matter what their physical ability may be. We recognise parents as the primary educators in their children’s lives and realise the significant role they have in ensuring they lead a healthy and active lifestyle. All members of staff are always available to support parents in this area. This year we have received input from external teachers for dance, boxing, athletics and soccer.

As mentioned above our teachers teach each strand of the PE curriculum (Athletics, Dance. Games, Gymnastics, Outdoor and Adventure and Aquatics). This year we were so lucky to have extra PE input from some fantastic coaches outside of our school. Gabriela from Athletics Ireland worked with all Senior Infants. Leah our amazing dance teacher worked with all Junior and Senior Infants. Tony from Shamrock Rovers helped coach First classes and Mags from South Dublin County Sports Partnerships worked with all Second classes to improve their boxing skills. Thank you to our own Ms. Glavin who helped organise the teaching of Land PAWS to support the aquatics strand.

Parent Survey.

We continuously try to improve the delivery of our Physical Education (PE) curriculum. If you haven’t already done so we would really appreciate if you would take the time to complete this short questionnaire, your feedback is very important to us.

https://forms.gle/p1FvNDZtVEtfPhYQ6

Don’t forget to keep up to date with our Active School news and events on ClassDojo

Active School Week.

Active School Week is one of the most popular weeks in the school calendar. Tracksuits replace uniforms for both pupils and staff, active homework replaces regular homework and active travel to school is promoted. All pupils take part in a range of fun activities and events across different strands of the P.E. curriculum. Local sports clubs and sporting organisations visit the school to provide diverse P.E classes. Pupils have an active say in what they would like to be included as part of this weeks’ activities. Our Active School week took place this year from 30th May-3rd June. We had so much fun being active. There were so many exciting activities throughout the week. We took part in obstacle courses, novelty races, tug-o-war, Gaelic football, boxing, hurling dancing, inflatable games, orienteering, boot camps and so much more.

Active School committee