The provisional calendar for next year is now online on the school app and reflected on the calendar on the school website. It is advisable to use these calendars as a source of information for up-to-date calendar events etc. Thank you.

As many families of the school community may be going on holidays soon to beach areas, the following advice is worth a read. Stay safe and enjoy the delights of sea, but please be careful and cautious at all times in the water. Taken from FB: As a former surf lifesaver I constantly find myself when I'm at a beach automatically in patrol mode, and I'm always troubled seeing the amount of swimmers that enter the surf straight into a rip zone. This includes, and most worrying of all children. I know a lot of people are kind of aware of what to do if caught in a rip, but it has been brought to my attention recently that a lot of people aren't aware of what a rip actually looks like or where the safest place to swim at the beach is if there is no flagged area. One person will drown every two to three days this summer... 90% of those fatalities will be rip-related. Here are a few things that will help you and your kids stay safe this summer. I have also put together a few images that show what to look for. 1. The easiest thing to remember is that often the safest/calmest most enticing looking area along a beach is usually a rip. A rip is usually the area devoid of wave activity and appears darker and deceptively calmer. It can sometimes appear milky or turbulent, but it is always pretty much void of wave activity. All that water coming in via waves has to go back out somehow, this is what a rip is. (see pics). 2. Always take 5-10 mins when you get to the beach to observe surf conditions and identify where these areas are. 3. If you are caught in a rip, DO NOT PANIC. Go into floating mode and raise one arm as a distress signal when possible. See which direction the rip is taking you, is it straight out or at an angle? once you have determined this, and if you have the energy, swim to the right or left of the direction of flow, never against. Some rips can move at 3 times the speed of an olympic swimmer, you won't win! If you cannot swim out to either side of the rip, just go with it. Most rips won't take you out very far, and will usually spit you out not long after they take you, so keep calm and save your energy for the swim back to shore. 4. If you have kids, show them these pictures, educate them and make them aware. You can't always be watching them, and it is only a matter of a few metres each way of the point of entry to the water that could mean them being safe, or instantly caught in a rip. Obviously the safest place to swim is always between the flags on a patrolled beach, but this isn't always practical given the immensity of our coast line and number of beautiful beaches. Of course there are many other factors that can come into play when it comes to beach safety, but rips are the No.1 killer. They are not hard to identify, and 10 mins observation before entering the water is much easier than body retrieval. *The darker/calmer areas in the pics are rips. The one with purple dye shows rip movement. Stay safe.

Press pass is a TY student journalism and news literacy programme run by Newsbrands Ireland, the representative body for national news publishing industry. Please check out the Irish Times, today, Monday 7th June for further details. Congratulations to Eve Leslie in TY who has been awarded 3rd place in the Features category for her feature entitled - Climate Change is threatening our very existence. Well done, Eve on this wonderful achievement. Maith thú!

Congratulations to the TY Social Innovator classes who created wonderful videos to represent the very important work they have done in their YSI projects during the course of the year. The groups believe that these very important issues have to be addressed,. Please click on the links below to watch their videos.. Well done to the TYs students for all the work they have done to create these powerful videos. Sincere thanks to Ms Howard and Ms Madden for their work in guiding the students through the process of creating these videos. WELL DONE TO ONE AND ALL. Tune your mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sucAYfnjve8 Speak out: See it, Sense it, Stop it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PC6945ZXf98 Speak out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZaAXsgFJB0 How small changes make a big difference; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoVqujuYX_0 ENJOY.