Welcome to our Green Schools Page!
This year St Fiacc’s Green Schools Committee will working on the theme of Travel. We will investigate how our school can travel more sustainably and how we can raise awareness about active travel. St. Fiacc’s has a great commitment to our environment and we have already been awarded a Green Flag for Litter, Energy, Water and Global Citizenship: Marine Environments.
2021
We started off the year celebrating National Bike Week 2021. The weather was not on our side unfortunately, but we still managed to do some fun activities, such as running an art competition to design a new bike helmet. Here are a few of the entries from the junior and senior classes.
We had yet another great Climate Action Week in October. Each class made a pledge on how they could help the environment and reduce our impact. Here are some photos of our pledges.
Every Halloween, we run a fancy dress competition around a Green School theme. This year our theme was sustainable travel. Well done to our winners, Katelyn and Liam Moran, for their creative and handmade costumes!
One of the first tasks for our new Green School committee was to begin our environmental review. We conducted a walkability audit around our school to see what risks there are for anyone who walks or cycles to school. It helped us to notice some of the great features we already have in place, such as safe crossings and signposts. However, it also highlighted a few problem areas that we hope to work on in the coming year. A big thank you to our Green Schools Travel Officer, Lucy Murphy, for her help and guidance!
Our next step was to carry out a travel survey with the students in our school. Have a look at the graph below to see which modes of transport are most common in St Fiacc’s at the moment.
Here are some students celebrating our first Walk on Wednesday day as part of the Big Travel Challenge. Well done to everyone who walked to school today!
In March we held a scooting skills workshop for our Junior and Senior Infants. Our Greens Officer, Lucy Murphy, taught them lots of new skills about how to scoot safely.
We ended the school year with lots of class walks and activities outdoors. It was great to see everyone travelling actively and making an effort to help the environment.
2022
Welcome back from everyone in the Green Schools Committee! Stay tuned for updates on this year’s plans and activities.
Congratulations to our first Walk on Wednesday winners for the new school year. Miss Davitt’s class had an amazing 90% of students who walked or did a park and stride to school. Well done everyone!
Walk on Wednesday winners September 28th: Miss Mullen’s 3rd Class. Congratulations!
Walk on Wednesday winners October 5th: Ms. Kavanagh’s 4th Class. Well done!
This week we celebrated Climate Action Week. We investigated several different ways we can make a positive change to the environment, with a different focus each day.
Walk on Wednesday winners for October 20th: Miss Davitt’s 3rd Class. Great job!
Walk on Wednesday winners for October 26th: Miss Davitt’s 3rd Class. Third win this year – amazing!
We held our annual Halloween dress up competition on October 28th. This year our theme was ‘Walking in the Woods’. We had great fun dressing up as woodland animals.
Congratulations to our competition winners – Una Hamilton (Junior Winner), Mia Simeoni (Senior Winner) and Michaela Cullen (Most Creative Costume). Well done!
Walk on Wednesday winners for November 16th: Miss Coakley’s 1st Class!
The 21st – 25th November is Clean Air Week. Let’s make and extra special effort to walk and cycle to school this week!
Walk on Wednesday winners for 23rd November: Ms. Scully’s 5th Class. Well done!
Well done to Mr. O Flaherty’s 6th Class for winning the Walk on Wednesday competition two weeks in a row!
For our final WOW day before Christmas, we decided to do a Christmas themed walk or cycle. Congratulations to Ms. Scully’s 5th Class who had everyone walking or doing a park and stride! A special mention to Taylor in Ms. Mullen’s 3rd Class too, who did an amazing job decorating his bicycle. Happy Christmas everyone!
———————————————————————————————————
Have a look at our work from our previous theme – Global Citizenship: Marine Environments.
St.Fiacc’s Green Schools Committee is up and running for the year ahead!
This year St Fiacc’s Green Schools Committee will be investigating the topic Global Citizenship: Marine Environment. As part of this topic we will be learning all about pollution in our rivers, seas and oceans. We will investigate how our school can help to reduce this pollution and raise awareness about the impact it has on wildlife and people all around the world. St. Fiacc’s has a great commitment to our environment and we have already been awarded a Green Flag for Litter, Energy and Water.
Here is our committee:
We have been working very hard over the last few months; here are just some of the things that we have gotten up to!
- We elected our Green School’s Committee.
- We conducted a survey to find out how much our students and teachers knew about the marine environment.
- We talked to the school about what the marine environment is and how it is being polluted.
Our first task of the year was to complete a 2 minute beach or river clean. We collected our materials and headed off to the River Barrow to see if there was much rubbish polluting our river. We were happy to see that there wasn’t as much rubbish as we had thought there would be. On our way we found a lot of rubbish on the path so we cleaned that up too!
We did lots of work in our classrooms to learn about marine environments and how pollution can affect them. In November we took part in Climate Action Week. We investigated the effects of climate change and how harmful plastic is to the environment. Each class made a pledge to show how they were going to work on reducing the amount of plastic we use every day.
Some of our committee members made a presentation in assembly to tell us all about conserving water. We learned that small changes in what we do can make a big difference!
It’s a new year and time for a new committee! Unfortunately, this year we could not create a committee with students from different classes, so instead we nominated one class to take on the role of the committee and each individual class created a Green Schools monitor to keep an eye on all things ‘green’ in the classrooms! Even though our theme is about marine environments, it is important that we keep working on reducing our waste, conserving water and energy and walking/cycling to school whenever we can.
For Halloween, we held a fancy dress competition. Students could dress as their favourite marine creature, or make a costume that showed a marine theme. We had some fantastic entries. Well done to Emily Nolan who won in our senior category and Conor Matthews who won in our junior category!
Miss Ivory’s 5th class are acting as our committee for this year. Their first task was to organise an Action Day. They organised a brilliant day of learning filled with exciting lessons about marine life, lots of activities and videos to explore issues with the ocean and even a treasure hunt for the junior classes. Have a look at some photos from our ‘Marine Mission Day’!
We added some new books to our school library. They all explore our Green Schools theme of marine environments and teach us about being more responsible citizens!
We held a competition to design a new Green Code for this year’s theme. We had some amazing entries that really showed how we aim to help the marine environment. Our winning design was created by Rebeca in Ms. Rainey’s 4th Class.
Here is our new Green Code for our topic of Global Citizenship: Marine Environments
Well done to all our water poster competition finalists this year. We displayed the winning posters on our Green Schools notice board.
Recently we carried out a Marine Litter survey to see how much our knowledge of marine litter has improved over the last two years. We surveyed the students from 3rd to 6th class and we were delighted to see an improvement in the results. Have a look at our bar chart below to see for yourself!
We are delighted to announce that we have been awarded the green flag for our work on the Global Citizenship: Marine Environment theme. Thanks to everyone who has helped out over the past two years and well done to our hard working Green Schools Committee. We look forward to our virtual flag-raising ceremony in September!
