Togher N.S.

HISTORY CLASSES AND THE DUNMANWAY HERITAGE CENTRE

The Dunmanway Heritage Centre invited us to participate in a local history project. The children in middle classes researched some famous people from Dunmanway. Needless to mention, many chose to write about Sam Maguire. Children in 5 & 6 classes researched. The Famine in Dunmanway during the 1840’s.
The children have now produced a little booklet based on their findings and interpretations of various events. We believe the illustrations are outstanding and we hope the people in the Heritage Centre will like them too.
Younger children wrote about and drew their favourite places in Dunmanway. The pictures were really lovely, so well done to all the younger children. Congratulations to all the children for working so hard on this project.

HERITAGE COUNCIL

We invited Marie Brett, a heritage expert on the Bronze Age to visit the school recently. Each class had the opportunity to learn about life and art during the Bronze Age and to create pictures and designs on tin and bronze.

Heritage in Schools
Environmental Education Waterways

Stephanie O’Toole visited the school for the final part of our Nature Studies Project. Over the school year the children have been studying various habitats—the
local stream, hedgerows, trees, fields, etc—carrying out comparative studies to see how these habitats change as the seasons change.
The children in the upper classes have been carrying out comparative sampling of the stream, studying the animal and plant life, as well as trying to ascertain the purity of the water.
The middle classes are now quite professional botanists! They have been sampling the plant and animal life of their chosen habitats, and have been learning how to use keys to identify things themselves. They’ve not only been doing comparative studies of different times of year, but also of the different habitats.
The junior classes are proving to be budding botanists themselves! They have also been learning how to identify various plants and insects themselves, and on this final visit were learning how a botanist would take samples.
As well as all the botany, the children have also been learning about the traditional uses of many of the herbs and plants that grow in their locality, which all found very interesting.
Stephanie began this whole project by talking to the children about the concept of time, and about how, in the past, people would measure time not by a clock or calendar, by the moon phases and the changing seasons. She tied the lessons in to the Celtic Tree calendar and to Celtic folklore.
This has been an amazing project for the children to work on. It has covered science and nature, history and legend, as well as environmental studies. We’re very grateful to Stephanie for sharing her wealth of knowledge with us.