Stella Maris Primary School

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Newsletter 27/11/23

Dia duit a chara,

Veni Veni Emmanuel! O Come, O Come Emmanuel! It is almost time for Advent, and the boys and girls are busy learning their songs and poems for our Christmas concert. They will also learn “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel”, which is a beautiful advent hymn. The lyrics of this song make for a wonderful catechesis in and of themselves, as the boys and girls are reminded of Israel’s captivity in Babylon and their longing for the Lord to appear. How we should also long for the coming of Our Lord!

Apologies for the technical error in last week’s newsletter! The picture at the bottom was not of the children doing gymnastics, rather of a catechesis lesson! Please see below a picture of the boys and girls having fun during their PE lessons on Fridays. The boys and girls were exploring shape, direction and level. The children had so much fun during the lesson. Play is a very important methodology for teaching certain parts of subjects, especially for the young. The children are learning new things and developing new capabilities, all whilst having fun in playful activities.

This week, in our curriculum exploration, we will continue discussing our religious education. Not only have the Dominicans and the Institute of Christ the King been teaching our children, but we are also blessed to have Fr Bernardino, of the Franciscan Friars in Moyross, as a teacher for the children. Although he has been quite busy so far this year, he hopes to come back soon to teach the children how to pray. He taught the children about prayer very well last year by exploring scripture and by teaching them how to pray in the form of Lectio Divina.

We wish you all a blessed week. Please keep us in your prayers, and know that we keep all our benefactors in our daily morning prayers, too.

God bless you,

Richard Casey

Headmaster of Stella Maris School

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Newsletter 20/11/23

Dia duit a chara,

Let us continue to pray for the holy souls, especially during this month. Blessed Fulton Sheen spoke about how the holy souls we help get to heaven will welcome us to heaven when we get there, please God. We can help them and they can help us! Holy Souls, pray for us! Holy Souls, pray for Stella Maris School!

Please see below a picture of the boys and girls having fun during their PE lesson on Friday. We are currently learning about co-ordination, balance and shapes in gymnastics. The children have so much fun discovering new balances and getting the chance to model their shapes for the group, with everyone having to copy their shape and balance for 5 seconds. Physical education can help children to grow up with control over their bodies, similarly as to how religion helps children to gain control over their souls.

This week, in our curriculum exploration, we will continue discussing our religious education. As we mentioned last week, we are blessed with religious orders helping us to catechise our students. The children are being catechised in the Dominicans today! We are also blessed to have a Canon from the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest coming to teach our children catechism. Last year, the boys and girls learned about Creation, Original Sin and the Trinity, amongst many other doctrines from the Canon. The boys and girls are blessed to be receiving this catechesis during their primary years. This learning will stay with our pupils for life. Our students’ faith grows beautifully in the nurturing soil of a wholesome Catholic environment, with authentic catechesis provided by expert Canons! Let the fruits come 30, 60 and 100 fold, with the help of God!

We wish you all a blessed week. Please keep us in your prayers, and know that we keep all our benefactors in our daily morning prayers, too.

God bless you,

Richard Casey

Headmaster of Stella Maris School

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Newsletter 13/11/23

Dia duit a chara,

Let us continue to pray for the holy souls, especially during this month. Perhaps your prayers and sacrifices have already helped to release a soul from purgatory. This great friend of God may now be in heaven, interceding fervently for you. Holy Souls, pray for us! Holy Souls, pray for Stella Maris School!

Please see below some pictures of the boys and girls playing during recreation time over the last few weeks. School life helps to form children academically, spiritually, but also humanly. Having time for playing with friends and classmates is an important time for children to practise their social skills, relax and enjoy innocent childhood games and activities. Children have only one childhood in which to grow up in a strong Catholic school environment, surrounded not only by the good example of their family, but also by many other children and their families, each striving towards holiness. The nurturing, Catholic, friendly atmosphere in Stella Maris School helps to mould our children by formal teaching of manners and social skills, as well as a multitude of ordinary day-to-day experiences in which to practice the human virtues of courtesy, prudence in speech, kindness and patience.

In the coming weeks, in our curricular exploration, we will discuss the catechesis provided by Stella Maris School. We are very blessed to have many local religious orders helping us to provide an excellent standard of catechesis to the children. The children begin school on Monday morning by visiting the Dominican sisters in St Saviour’s Church. They receive a wonderful catechesis for an hour using ‘The Catechesis of the Good Shepherd’ programme, which is a child-friendly, engaging catechetical approach. You may find out more about the programme here: https://www.cgsusa.org/ Please see some pictures of the children below, enjoying the sisters’ activities and great resources.

We wish you all a blessed week. Please keep us in your prayers, and know that we keep all our benefactors in our daily morning prayers, too.

God bless you,

Richard Casey

Headmaster of Stella Maris School

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Newsletter 6/11/23

Dia duit a chara,

We hope you had a blessed Feast of All Saints. This month of November is very important for remembering those who have gone before us into the next life. Our students will be reminded of the importance of praying for the holy souls, who we can help to enter heaven by praying for them and by offering the sacrifice of the Holy Mass for them.

You will be very happy to see some pictures of the students, below, participating in the Traditional Latin Mass at the Sacred Heart Church. The beautiful celebration of the liturgy provides the children with the chance to be present at this beautiful meeting of heaven and earth, where God descends upon the altar for us to worship Him, through Him, with Him and in Him. The boys and girls are very aware of the sacredness of the moment of receiving Our Lord in Holy Communion. No moment is more reverent and sacred for each of us than receiving Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. Thank God for the chance for our students to attend the sacrifice of the Holy Mass regularly as part of our religious education.

The children are all in great form after a good rest during the mid-term break. They are all delighted to be back in school, to see their friends and teachers, and to learn about Christ and their various academic subjects. It will be a busy half-term for us all in Stella Maris School as we have our parent-teacher meetings, our new school sign being unveiled and our Christmas concert.

In our next newsletter we will continue our curriculum exploration. It has been very encouraging to hear how much people enjoy the newsletter and learning about our excellent classical curriculum.

We wish you all a blessed week. Please keep us in your prayers, and know that we keep all our benefactors in our daily morning prayers, too.

God bless you,

Richard Casey

Headmaster of Stella Maris School

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Newsletter 23/10/23

Dia duit a chara,

May Our Lady of the Rosary bless you and all your loved ones this October! Rosary initiatives have been taking place all around the country during this blessed month. We can be sure that this is blessing many people in many ways. Please see below some of the pictures of our wonderful pupils praying the rosary in the Dominican’s St Saviour’s Church, in The Institute of Christ the King’s Sacred Heart Church, and in the Augustinian’s Church. Where will we go for our final rosary? Send your guesses to info@stellamarisprimaryschool.com or if you would like to promote a prayer or catechetical initiative in our school, please contact us at the same email.

Mar a dúirt mé sa ríomhphost deireanach, tá dráma tábachtach inár scoil, which means, as I said in the last email, drama is important in our school. In relation to Irish, we use drama to help us to memorise our many poems. Using drama, which incorporates the use of various gestures and expression, with poetry ‘as Gaeilge’ is advantageous in four ways: it helps our students to remember our poems, it helps children to understand the meaning of the poems, and it motivates the children to recite poetry, as they are having fun doing so, and it gives children a great sense of accomplishment being able to perform poems for their family, and at school events.

As well as using drama in our poetry lessons, we also use drama to help us to practise our Gaeilge neamhfhoirmiúil agus ár bhfeidhmeanna teanga (informal Irish phrases and functional Irish phrases). These short easy dramas constantly revise the greetings and farewells that we have learned, as well as practising one or two of our new phrases. It was a great pleasure last week for me to witness a girl in class picking up a pencil and asking, “Cé leis é seo?”, with another girl responding, “Is liomsa é”. The first girl then said, “Seo duit”, which was followed by, “Go raibh maith agat”, and “Tá fáilte romhat”. Practising these things in drama, as well as modelling and encouraging as much Irish in class as possible, leads to children being able to have full and meaningful short conversations in our national, native language.

We wish you all a blessed week. Please keep us in your prayers, and know that we keep all our benefactors in our daily morning prayers, too.

God bless you,

Richard Casey

Headmaster of Stella Maris School

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Newsletter 9/10/23

Dia duit a chara,

The feast of the Most Holy Rosary was celebrated on Saturday. May we continue to practise this beautiful devotion to our blessed mother, as so many devout saints have done throughout the history of the Church.

Last week, we began our October Rosary Run! This rosary run entails visiting many of the beautiful churches around Limerick and praying the rosary. Last week, we visited the side altar in the Sacred Heart Church which is dedicated to Our Blessed Mother, the walls around which have recently been beautifully restored. You can see the beautiful altar and the newly painted walls in the picture below. Well done to the boys and girls for praying the rosary both in English and as Gaeilge.

Tá dánta agus amhráin an-tábhachtach inár gcuraculum. Poems and songs play a big part in our Irish curriculum. This starts in the earliest of classes, where the younger children take great pleasure and joy in the fun rhymes and songs that they learn. Likewise, in the older classes, children love learning poems and songs, and take great pride in reciting poems correctly for each other and for visitors to the school. Drama is strongly integrated into these lessons, as will be discussed more next week.

Thank you to everyone who helped with our recent coffee morning in the White House BnB, as well as to those who turned up with great cheer for the event. The morning was a great success, and there was a wonderful feeling of goodwill all morning and afternoon. Thank you very much to Liam and Antoinette Fitzgibbon for their extremely kind and generous hosting. We are truly grateful to you both! Thank you for organising a pianist for the morning also, it added greatly to the beautiful classical feeling of the morning as classical education was being discussed. Thank you all for your great generosity, it is greatly needed and appreciated!

We wish you all a blessed week. Please keep us in your prayers, and know that we keep all our benefactors in our daily morning prayers, too.

God bless you,

Richard Casey

Headmaster of Stella Maris School

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Newsletter 2/10/23

Dia duit a chara,

May Our Lady of the Rosary bless you and your loved ones this October. Please remember our school in your rosary intentions this month! We also pray to our guardian angels and to all the angels at the present liturgical time. We pray that the guardian angel of Stella Maris will continue to guide and guard our school over the coming year.

The boys and girls have had a wonderful week studying their various subjects. They are being developed and trained in body and soul. See below the catechesis lesson that the children received from the Dominican sisters. Thank you, sisters, for teaching our children so well about Christ and about the faith. The boys and girls were also developing their endurance and sprinting technique in PE this week. They are greatly improving their form and their athletic abilities.

In our Gaeilge curriculum, as we have previously discussed, oral Irish and Gaeilge neamhfhoirmiúil play a very important role. Informally speaking Gaeilge is also something that children love to do, and the use of Gaeilge throughout the school day motivates pupils to learn more, as they are experiencing speaking a language successfully. However, in order to learn a language well, it is vital that children learn the grammar of that language also. This needs to be done organically and systemically. The informal teaching of the younger years turns into the formal teaching of tenses, sentence structure and all the various rules that make up Irish grammar. In order to keep up the motivation of the students to study hard, it is important that the teacher believes in the importance of Irish, and loves speaking our national language. This ‘grá don ár dteanga náisiúnta’ is transmitted naturally to the students in day-to-day teaching, which demonstrates the importance of having a competent, confident and passionate Irish teacher.

Don’t forget that we have our coffee morning coming up this Saturday at 12pm! Please support this vital fundraiser for our school and don’t forget to bring a friend! We promise not only delicious treats, but also a warm and friendly Catholic environment, where matters of faith and hope can be discussed. It promises to be refreshing for both body and soul!

We wish you all a blessed week. Please keep us in your prayers, and know that we keep all our benefactors in our daily morning prayers, too.

God bless you,

Richard Casey

Headmaster of Stella Maris School

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Newsletter 25/9/23

Dia duit a chara,

The feast of Padre Pio was celebrated last Saturday. We pray that Padre Pio may bless our school with abundant blessings, and that we may offer up our work and sufferings for love of Christ, like he did so admirably throughout his life. St Padre Pio, pray for us!

From time to time, we will continue to return to the broader view of Stella Maris School’s curriculum and mission, before we return to the specific consideration of subjects in our curriculum. We all need to return to the contemplation of God, and the purpose of our life regularly, in order to renew ourselves and to ensure our life is being rightly oriented to its true end. It is the same with our school curriculum; whilst the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of our education is vital to explore, the ‘why’ of our education must be referenced regularly, in order that all our hard work be offered up for love of Christ, Our Lady and to save souls. Next week, we will return to the discussion of our Gaeilge curriculum. Tá súil agam go mbainfidh tú taitneamh as!

Our students were blessed during the week to have materials brought in for our science experiment. Thank you, Michael, for providing these for us! Pictures of the pupils planting acorns can be seen below. Following the planting, the experiment was then written out in our science copies, along with a diagram. The students also came up with the novel idea of naming their acorns. Antonio is just one of the names of our budding oak trees!!

Thank you, Wicki, for teaching Art to our students during the week. The children made beautiful rosary boxes for their beads. The children can now have a beautiful space in which to keep their rosary! The children were thrilled with the lesson. Thank you again, Wicki!

We are currently setting up a second classroom in Stella Maris School. This is a big step in the development of our school and it is a very exciting time! We have raised about half the amount needed, but are still in great need of funds, please donate if you are in a position to do so, and please share our fundraising campaign. You may find the link here: https://gofund.me/d5f4e675

As well as this, we have just ordered our new school sign! This will be a wonderful addition to our school, and it will help to inspire an even greater love in our pupils of Stella Maris School! This sign can be seen below. We need benefactors for all these projects, and so please donate to this cause if you can, here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/new-sign-for-stella-maris-school

We wish you all a blessed week. Please keep us in your prayers, and know that we keep all our benefactors in our daily morning prayers, too.