FPNS Parent Link

I am delighted to welcome you all back to Finglas Parochial for another year of fun and learning. A warm welcome to our new pupils and their families who have been settling in beautifully. It is so lovely to see the corridors and classrooms filled with happy, smiling faces again.

One of the best parts of my role is getting a chance to pop in to see the children busy at work in their different classrooms. I am always so impressed by the quality of the work they are engaged in and the amount of time and dedication our teachers put into creating interesting and fun lessons that cater for all of the different abilities in the classroom. Since coming back, I have spotted beautiful fine motor work in Ms. Foley's classroom, lots of lovely reading in Ms Reilly's room, and in Ms. O'Keeffe's football mad classroom the children have been learning to sing 'Football Crazy'!

A warm welcome to Ciara who joins our SNA team this year. It is always so rewarding to add another kind and caring colleague to our school and we look forward to working together over the coming year.

Is mise le meas,

Rachel

Our Junior Infants have been settling in really well and we are delighted to see them enjoying school so much! A reminder that from next week the children in Junior Infants will be completing full days in school from 8.30am - 1.10pm daily.

Swimming lessons will begin for 3rd - 6th class pupils on September 15th and will run for 6 Fridays in total. Tracy will send home a link for payment shortly.

Your child will need a bag for their swimming items, a swimming costume, a large towel, a swimming hat, and a plastic bag for wet items.

Pupils with long hair should tie their hair up on swimming days.

Please help your child to practice packing and unpacking their bag for swimming lessons and talk them through the steps to follow when getting changed.

Please do not send in goggles as these are not needed.

If your child has additional needs and you would prefer to assist them with getting changed, you are welcome to do so.

Classes will arrive at the pool at approximately 9.40am for their 10am swimming lesson and the lesson will last for 45 mins.

Our new hot lunch option has been very well received by our pupils. You will have received login details to order your child's menu of choice last week. Please keep these login details safe. We will be unable to replace these and you will need to ring Carambola for the login details if you misplace these. Thank you in advance for your help with this. If you have not logged in yet, your child will receive a set menu, which may or may not be to their liking so it is advisable to change this order as soon as possible.

The school will shortly be moving to Aladdin Connect. Aladdin Connect is an app that allows parents to register the reason for their child's absence, keep track of the number of days missed, grant permissions for various activities and keep up to date with new messages from the school. You will be sent a link to sign up for Aladdin Connect in due course. To do our part for the environment, the school will be keeping paper notes to an absolute minimum and we kindly ask that all parents sign up for the app when it is time to do so. You can read more about Aladdin Connect here: https://www.aladdin.ie/parent.html#:~:text=Aladdin%20Connect%20is%20used%20by,%2C%20homework%2C%20and%20library%20books.

A special thank you to Michael's (4th Class) and Charlie's (5th Class) grown ups who were in before school started to build new desks for the children. They also helped to build libraries and teacher desks too. As a small school we are very reliant on the kindness of parents for work such as this and we really appreciate the time and effort from Stephen, Pete and Paul who have ensured that every child in the school is sitting at a lovely new desk this year.

This year, we are excited to move to a number of new and engaging programmes that will enhance the learning of our pupils. Most notably we have made a big change to our English scheme to one which incorporates all elements of the New Primary Language Curriculum. We have also moved to exciting new schemes in Music and Drama. We are constantly re-evaluating our schemes to ensure that they best meet the needs of our pupils. More changes are planned for the next academic year.

As previously communicated, there will be no homework this week. When homework begins, if you find that your child is struggling, please make contact with your child's teacher who will be happy to offer advice and support.

For the first 4 weeks of homework, we will be trialing the concept of no written homework on a Thursday evening. Homework on Thursdays will consist of reading, spellings, tables etc. We will then send out a parent survey to gather your thoughts on this and to assess whether this is something that works well for our pupils and their families. We would really appreciate your thoughts on this when we send out the survey link.

Parents of Junior Infants have received information about the HSE vaccinations that will take place for their child's class in the school in October. Please remember to return your child's form, whether you wish to avail of the service or not.

Don't forget to follow us on our website (finglasparochialns.ie), on Facebook and on Instagram for all of the latest news in the school.

Contact Us: If you wish to contact your child's teacher, please phone our school secretary Tracy on 8347349 to arrange a phone call/meeting or email finglasparo@gmail.com. Please indicate the subject matter of the query and your child's teacher will be in contact with you as soon as possible.