Welcome to our blog about the Transition Year in St Wolstans Community School, Celbridge, Co Kildare. Here you will read all about what happens in Transition Year. You will get a good idea of how busy our year is!
Follow individual student blogs as well and see how they are getting on.

All contributions come from the students themselves and the TY Coordinator.
Enjoy






Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Schools Across Borders

Two weeks ago, we had a talk with Darren Irvine, the founder of "Schools Across Borders" about the work he does with students in areas of conflict. Darren has worked with students all over the world. He helps young people to connect with their peers, both locally and internationally,to help work for a more just, equal and peaceful world. 

We are taking part in a project they are running called 
Global Citizens Network 2013-2014. This is a network of schools in Ireland and it also includes other schools around the world. There are two main stages to this program the Research Stage and the Campaign Stage.  We will be learning from each other and discussing different key themes in the world. 

Our class has started the Research Stage. During this each school group shall research, reflect and debate key local-global themes. We have been coming up with a theme that we will be researching. First of all we put our ideas forward and we wrote the top 7 ideas on sheets of paper. We got into groups and went around the classroom writing down what we know and what we would like to know about each theme. In the end everyone agreed with the overarching question that we came up. It is: "Is the world child friendly?".

We will be getting into groups and researching the life of children all over the world from different points of view like education, gender, conflict, etc.. In the end we will answer the question from all these aspects of a child's life, discovering where in our world is the most child friendly. 
 When we have finished this we plan on developing a “mini-NGO” type campaign.

You can find out more at http://www.schoolsacrossborders.org/



Monday, October 14, 2013

Laura uses picmonkey.com

Laura has written a short tutorial post on how to create a picture montage using PicMonkey.

Here are her instructions:


First of all open up a search engine e.g google chrome and search 

On the top centre of the page there should be a button that says create a collage. When you hover the mouse over it, it should say click to start or drag images here click on it. 
 (It should look like the above images)



Click the Read More below........

Friendship Week fun!

Rowen has been blogging about our Fun Walk last Friday. Here's what she writes.....

Well on Friday was the Fun Walk. Its one of the major events in the school. Each year is given a color and each base class has o think of a song and put a dance to it to preform on front of the school and judges.

                                      1st year- Pink
                                      2nd year- Purple
                                      3rd year- Green
                                      TY- Yellow
                                      5th year- Blue
                                      6th year- Black and White

Click the Read More below.......

Tuesday, October 8, 2013

Road Safety Week

The RTY team interviewed Pat Mc Neeley of Bayside Services when he came to the school today to deliver the Drive 4 Life road safety workshop. The workshop was sponsored by Kildare Road Safety officer Declan Keogh, who also came into the school to visit TY.

We are only experimenting with podcasting at the moment so bear with us. We have some help to improve our podcasts coming soon though!


Listen to their short interview below.


Check out Kildare Road safety on Facebook

Work experience has Ailbhe in stitches!

Ailbhe and Laura tell us about what they did on their first Wednesday of work experience.

A trip to St Enda's Park

Sarah Louise and Aoife give a quick report on last week's trip to St Enda's Park. We recorded this with very little preparation - it did take 7 attempts to get it right though!

Monday, October 7, 2013

Preparations and podcasts.

We tried out a quick podcast today while class Tabei practised for the Fun Walk on Friday. The Fun Walk ends our Friendship Week in school. The whole school goes on a short colourful walk.




Here is the original 'Jump on It' from the Fresh Prince of Belair
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCFRJEjM3fc

And here's Carlton singing the Tom Jones classic 'It's not Unusual'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKSxlJPmz40

And the Taxi cab song here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fp7RmDFH-p8