Green Schools | Our Lady of Good Councel

Walk to School Week 19th to 23rd September

Last week was Walk to School week, with Wednesday being National Walk to School Day.

Our new Green School Committee were very busy organising and promoting the event starting the previous week. The sun shone brightly each day (except Thursday) and it was great to see so many of our boys either ‘Walking to School’ or engaging in a ‘Park and Stride’.

The Green School Committee boys visited the classes from Junior Infants up to 6th class, each morning, to carry out their survey to determine our daily totals of the number of boys who walked all or some of the way to school.

On National Walk to School Day (Wednesday 21st Sept.), our totals were:

Walked: 156 boys
Park & Stride: 79 boys

Figures gathered throughout the week showed:

Walked: 725
Park & Stride: 371

A wonderful achievement! Well done to all our boys who participated throughout the week.

Much work was done in school discussing the many benefits of walking and the boys’ observations as they walked to school. Things they saw, heard and anything that they had not noticed before.

Mrs. Sheehan’s / Ms. Morrissey’s 4th class took on the ‘Investigate & Create Challenge’, which involved a deeper investigation & analysis of their journey to school. This included observations regarding; Safe Crossing, Driver Behaviour, Litter and Traffic. They plan to work in groups to produce a ‘News Today’ style video of their findings. This certainly pulls together many aspects of learning; SPHE (Health & Wellbeing), SESE (Care for our Environment), English (Oral Language), Maths (Data Analysis), Drama and ICT.

To round up our ‘Walk to School’ week, our Dun Laoghaire Rathdown Green Schools Officer (Sarah McEllistrem) arrived on Friday with the ‘Walk to School’ banner above, which shows our Green School Co-ordinator Mrs. Sheehan and our Green School Committee boys (Leo, Darragh, Zac, Luke, Blaine, Mason, Kobi and Sam). The Green School Committee were delighted to receive official badges, pencils and high-viz school bag tags and a supply of ‘Walk to School’ stickers to give to all the boys who walked to school.

Walking to school has many benefits; chatting with friends, healthy exercise for the heart & strengthening bones, happier mood and improved ability to focus in class.

Our Green School Committee will actively promote WOW (Walk on Wednesdays) throughout the school year.

Well done to all who participated and a big thank you to our Green School Committee for all their work in organising and running the event.