Active Schools

We achieved Active Flag status after 4 years work with Ms Brassil as co-ordinator in May 2015. This initiative involved looking at our Healthy Eating Policy, our PE Policy, having Active School committee meetings regularly and adopting the ‘Buddy Bench’ idea. The idea being that children who feel they are alone in the school yard could go and sit on this bench and either classmates or children from the Student Council would then go and speak to the child, with the view to helping them join in a suitable game, so they are not alone.

We began Active Week as part of this flag and have kept Active Week going in our school now yearly. During this Active Week, we invite experts to our school to give children a taste of activities they might not usually get an opportunity to try, such as horse-riding, yoga, hip-hop, gymnastics, Tae-Kwon-Do, boxing. Feedback from Active Week has been phenomenal and we have had impressive guest speakers such as world champion John Lehihan, basketball and football legend Kieran Donaghy, Kerry coach Jack O’Connor, TV celebrity and fitness coach Joe O’Connor. We thank all these speakers and volunteers sincerely for giving us their time for free.

We now have our Active Week during June, when weather is usually more dependable. We walk to school daily from the Windmill and each class has a designated ‘wheels’ day where they bring bicycles to school. We do hikes and try to incorporate Sports Day into this week too. Though we haven’t re-applied to keep our Active Flag status, due to concentrating on Health Promoting School and Daily Mile, we continue to adopt all of its policies and remain a very active school.