The Nativity

Preparing for Christmas

We are learning all about the Christmas story. We are also rehearsing for our Christmas Play'Christmas with the Aliens', where the story of the First Christmas is explained to some aliens who have landed on earth, as their space ship has broken down. The children are rehearsing for their Christmas play and explain the true meaning of Christmas to them.

We also have both a Christmas calendar and an Advent calender in our class. The Christmas calendar helps us to count down the days until Santa comes (and teacher has put sweets in the calendar and a different person gets a sweet each day). The Advent Calendar helps us to get our hearts ready for the coming of Jesus. Each day we pray for different intentions on the Advent Calendar.

We have put up the nativity scene on our altar in class.

Holy Souls

Each day in November, we remembered all those who have died. Our parents helped us to write down the names of all those we wished to pray for and then we decorated the crosses.

Advent wreath

 We have an Advent wreath in class.

The wreath has 5 candles:- 3 purple, 1 pink and 1 white.

The purple candles represent hope, peace and joy, the pink candle represents love and the white candle represents the birth of Jesus.

We light one new candle each week until Christmas, purple, purple, pink, purple and the last one, the white one, is lit on Christmas Day.

Learn all about Advent on:

Advent wreaths

Advent is a time of preparation.

We are getting ready for the birth of Jesus Christ.

Advent starts on Sunday.  We made Advent wreaths today.  We used paper plates and crepe paper.  They look nice now but will look even nicer when they are finished.

A visit to the church

We went to visit the church beside our school last week. We saw the altar, tabernacle, lectern, baptismal font, organ, crucifix and  beautiful stained glass windows. We prayed for our family and friends. 

Ash Wednesday

Today is Ash Wednesday.

It is the first day of Lent.

Lent will last for 40 days (and 6 Sundays) and will finish with Easter.

Some of us will give up things we like for Lent, or we will try and be nice to others.

We got ashes on our foreheads today to remind ourselves that we have come from dust and ashes and that when we die we will become dust and ashes again.

We are alive now.

Now is the time to live like good Christians and to love God and love others.

We will try to be nice to each other, especially this Lent.

We also wear the ashes so other people will know that we are trying to be good followers of Christ.

Read all about Ash Wednesday by clicking on the picture below:

Lent

Our visit to Renmore Church

We went over to our local church today to visit this special place.

Our church is called St.Oliver Plunkett's Church, Renmore, after a famous Irish saint.

We looked all around the church and teacher explained what each thing in the church is for.

We also had fun at school with these two interesting websites.

These websites helped us learn all about the church before our visit.

St. Brigid brings the Spring

We learned all about St. Brigid and how she was so good and kind to the poor. She wanted some land to build a church, so that the people would have somewhere to go to, to talk to God. She approached the Chieftian to ask him for some land to build a church on, but he was rather mean (he had never heard about the love of God) and he decided to play a trick on poor St. Brigid. He said that he would give her the amount of land that her cloak would cover. St. Brigid placed her cloak on the ground and at first it didn't cover much land at all!!! The Chieftian began to laugh and laugh. Poor St. Brigid didn't know what to do and her heart sank. Then suddenly something miraculous began to happen - her cloak began to spread out and grow and grow!!!. Now it was Brigid's turn to laugh!!. The Chieftian went as white as a ghost and begged her to shout 'stop.' She did, but only when she had plenty of land to build the church on. 

We learned a lovely song about this story and we also made up our own poem about the story. We made a St. Brigid's cross using 4 strips of paper and we filled in her cloak using coloured paper to create a patchwork effect. 

St. Brigid's Day

St. Brigid's Day is on Saturday, February 1st.

We heard a wonderful story about how St. Brigid got land from a chieftain on which to build her church.

The chieftain told Brigid that she could have as much land as her cloak would cover.

Brigid's cloak grew and grew and covered enough land on which to build a church.

Here is our version of St. Brigid's cloak. 

Sr. Breda's visit

 We had a lovely visit from Sr. Breda on Friday.

We chatted about the Christmas story and we sang lots of nice Religion songs.

 We even had a night off homework which was great!

Catholic Schools Week

26th January - 2nd February 2014

Creating Little Beings

This week teacher read two stories about Little Beings who learned how to make friends and how to be energetic and eager. We used our imagination to create our own Little Beings.