Young Scientist

On the Thursday 7th of the of January we went to the BT Young Scientist exhibition, TYs and second years always go to support the girls that are taking part in the competition. It was so busy, there was people everywhere. The first thing I did was go and visit the girls projects. This year there was 3 projects from Wolstans: Jade and Shamira had a project on teamwork, Linda and Megan had a project on does your gender affect your ability to lie and Caolann had a project on how humming can help asthmatics. Myself, Aoife, Eilis and Caolann then went for lunch. We all ended up getting O' Briens. After that we strolled around looking at other exhibitions and trying to get some free things. For the rest of the day we just sat at Caolann's project, but every time people came to look at the project me and Aoife had to get up because people kept asking us what we did for the project, We left the RDS at 2:30 to be back in school at four.

Amber Flag

As part of our campaign to get the school an Amber Flag,  the two transition year classes have been meeting every Tuesday during religion to plan up coming events. We are divided into groups: Noticeboard, Audit, PR, Events and Web Committee. I'm in the Audit group. We have to write about what is going on, take photographs and file all the documents to do with the Amber Flag.

On Friday the 4th of December, we will be holding an Amber Day. During Amber Day we will have a bake sale during lunch to fund raise for Pieta House, students will be busking in the court yard, we will be going around with Emoji boards. We also have been putting up positive messages around the school. Last week we were each told to write something we were grateful for on a post it to go, some were a little more important then others! We are also making amber braclets and handing them out to anybody that wants one.

Christmas Cake :)

In home ec for the past two weeks we've been making Christmas cakes and decorating them. I'm partners with Eilis. We decided to make a chocolate biscuit cake instead of actual Christmas cake. We came into class on the first day to make the class with no actual recipe so we just kind of added a bunch of chocolate and sweets we had at home. Our cake had maltesers, milk chocolate, smarties, crunchie and mini marshmallows- so really healthy for you, carb free, sugar free, fat free......

The next week when we had to decorate it we had no real plan going into the class either. We searched Christmas cakes on google, and with our last minute inspiration decided to make a snowman cake. We covered the cake in white fondant, made a carrot nose out of orange fondant, a hat out of red fondant and attempted to make black icing- it didn't really go to plan and turned out more grey instead..... The cake looked better then I thought it would considering we were had no plans made before each class and everything else we had made in home ec hadn't really gone to plan!!

WWI Green Poppies

In history for the past couple of weeks we have been studying WWI- how and why it began and how the war effected Ireland. We did all this in preparation for November 11th, the anniversary of the day the war ended.

Irish soldiers signed up to fight with the British to help get Home Rule in Ireland. But during the war the 1916 Easter Rising took place, this caused tension between the British and the Irish in the trenches. The Irish soldiers were forced to do the jobs the British didn't want to. Over 30,000 Irish soldiers died in the war and the soldiers that returned home were effected both physically and mentally. The Irish soldiers were treated as traitors back home in Ireland.

Every year the British commemorate the soldiers that fought for them in World War I by wearing red poppies. Poppies are worn because they are the only plant that grew in no mans land between the trenches. We decided to make poppies to commemorate the forgotten Irish soldiers. Our poppies were green instead of red to represent the Irish. On Tuesday the 10th of November we went around to the other classes in school and told them about the work we had been doing to remember the forgotten Irish soldiers. We urged them to take a poppy and wear them into school on Wednesday.

Kilkenny Art Trip!

On Thursday the 24th of September the the TYs with Ms. Carpenter and Ms. Brogan went on a trip to Kilkenny to see the Irish, Oscar nominated, animated movie "Song of the Sea".

"Song if the Sea" is a movie made by the Irish animation studio Cartoon Saloon. Cartoon Saloon have previously worked on the movie "The Book of Kells". We got a private screening of the movie at the cinema in Kilkenny. The movie is about a young Irish boy, Ben, who finds out that his younger sister, Saoirse, is a selkie who must find her voice and free supernatural creatures from the spell of a Celtic goddess, The movie is based loosely on William Butler Yeats poem "The Stolen Child."


After seeing the movie we went to an exhibition on the movie in the Butler Gallery in Kilkenny Castle. We met one of the animators he told us about the process of making an animated film. He said to make a good film you need 24 pictures PER SECOND.  We got to see all of the animators story boards and all the sketches used throughout the making of the film.

After the exhibition, when we were waiting for the other class to finish we turned into a tourist attraction for an American family who were amazed by our uniforms, especially our long kilts because in America they rarely have school uniforms. They were so shocked they even asked for photos of some of the girls in their school uniforms,

TY Carlingford Trip!!

One of the first trips we went on in TY was the trip to Carlingford. We left school at 9 am on Thursday the 17th of September. We arrived in Carlingford at around 10:30. We were split into two groups: Group A and Group B. Group B spent the morning in the water. I was in Group A we spent the morning doing team building challenges. Here we were split into groups of 8. These included a challenge called communication breakdown- we were put into a small room that was three stories high, it was pitch dark and we had to find our way of of the maze by following the person in front of us and giving instructions to the people behind us. We also did a tan-gram challenge where half the team made a shape from cutouts of other shapes like triangles, squares and parallelograms. The then had to describe how to make this shape to the other half in order to win jewels. After these challenges we went back to the center for lunch. We had chicken and chips. After lunch we were divided into our rooms for the night. In my room was- Anna, Aoife, Eilis, Aoife,Laura, Caoimhe, Tara, Erin, Laura, Susan and Lucy. 

After lunch my group went to do the water sports. We walked to the pier and were given a safety brief before putting on our wetsuits, lifejackets and helmets. The first thing we did was pier jumping. We could jump off the small pier or climb on a wall and jump from a higher spot. After pier jumping we got into the canoes and canoed out the water trampoline We took turns going on. At the end everyone go pushed off the trampoline into the water by one of the instructors John. We all decided to push him in but nobody was able to. Eilis grabbed his life jacket and pulled him into the water as she jumped in. 

After water sports we went back to the center for dinner. We were given stew and potatoes. We were given some time to relax, and stay in our rooms. At around 9 pm we went to night line. We were blindfolded and had to stand in a line and go through a obstacle course only guided by rope and what the person in front of us was saying. After this we went back to the center and we went to the chippers and the Chinese. 

On Friday we were woken up in the and told to clean our rooms, pack away our stuff and go for breakfast. After breakfast my group went zip lining and and the other group went to the team building challenges. We left Carlingford at 3 to go home