Ballymoney National School

Congratulations and best wishes to our wonderful school secretary, Susan, on her retirement after 25 years of dedicated service.

Her smiling face, flexibility and commitment will be greatly missed by our whole school community. She is also renowned for her delicious coffee cakes, and Sixth Class boys were delighted when she gave them a cake-making demonstration — followed by some very enjoyable sampling!

Thank you for everything, and we wish you every happiness in your retirement! ❤️❤️

Last Thursday, our senior classroom enjoyed a fantastic school tour to Oysterhaven Activity Centre!

The children had a brilliant day kayaking, rafting, jumping from the inflatable AquaFun course and getting very muddy while taking on the Jungle Quest. They also enjoyed some team-building activities and had lots of fun working together.

A great day was had by all! 🛶🏊💦

Junior Room tour to Innishannon!

Cast your mind back to when it was actually raining last week! This was a not-so-nice showery day last Thursday but our junior pupils still had a ball! From sampling pastries at Wildflour Bakery, to exploring the old church tower, having fun in the playground and exploring the woods and ending up in Centra for ice-cream 🥐 ⛪️ 🛝 🪵🍦
The best part was getting lorries and cars to beep at us while we were waiting for the bus home, even the guards beeped at us and put on the blue lights 🚔

Today we had a wonderful interactive visit from Sam the Park Ranger, who brought lots of different varieties of moths to school!

Our favourite was the buff-tip moth, which was brilliantly camouflaged to look just like a little stick. We also learned that there are around 1,500 varieties of moths in Ireland, along with lots of other fascinating facts.

A huge thank you to Sam for such an engaging and memorable visit! 🪰

After the competition, we visited the Bandon Heritage Centre, where Colin Nichols treated us to a fascinating talk. Colin has lovingly restored the organ from St. Paul's Church, Ballymoney, located just up the lane from our school. The organ now has a new home in the Heritage Centre.

Colin shared the remarkable restoration story with us and explained how the organ works. He also gave us a wonderful recital, and the children thoroughly enjoyed listening to the music and learning more about this important piece of local heritage.

A huge thank you to Colin and everyone at Bandon Heritage Centre for making our visit so enjoyable and informative! 🎶 ⛪️

On Thursday, our Senior Classroom travelled to Bandon for an exciting orienteering competition in Bandon Park.

The pupils had a fantastic day putting their navigation and teamwork skills to the test. A special congratulations to our fastest pair, who also got all of the answers correct! 👏 🧭 🏃 🗺️

Well done to the winners of this years River Ecosystem Projects award! They were presented with their prizes at the GLOBE Ireland Primary School awards last week. A huge thank you to Local Authority Waters Programme for sponsoring the wonderful prizes! The winners were:
- St Brigid's NS Meath Hill

There was so much exceptional work submitted that honourable mentions must go to:
- Ballymoney NS Ballymoney National School
- Clontuskert NS
- Kilglass NS
- Monkstown ETNS
- Faughart NS Faughart CNS

We are delighted to share that our school won the award for Outstanding Science Communication at the Globe Ireland Awards in Dublin this week! 🏆🔬

The award recognised the fantastic podcast created by our class about their citizen science project investigating the water quality of the River Bandon. 🌊🎙️

A huge congratulations to all the students involved for their hard work, creativity, and commitment to environmental science. We are incredibly proud of this wonderful achievement and the way our students communicated the importance of protecting our local waterways.

🎧 You can listen to the podcast here: The Ballymoney Stories – The River Edition
https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/f04e6c96-d6b9-4a47-8242-bb3a8cf8ef0c/episodes/4a3326eb-016e-4548-a623-2316fe17c866/the-ballymoney-stories-the-river-episode

Well done everyone! 👏

We celebrated National Bike Week by having a cycling workshop with Ulick from Bike Wizards lots of progress made on the day! 🚴 🚲

🗑️ 🚮 Spring Clean in the countryside!
All of our pupils took part in a spring clean on the roads around our school today!
Amazing what you find on our roadsides!
We hope the pupils feel a little more empowered after doing their bit to clean up in the local area! 👏