Scoil Ghobnatan is one of the first schools in the whole of Ireland to be awarded the 'Gold- Expert Citizenship Award from Univesity College Cork. In order to achieve this award, we explored all about the European Union through the Big friendly Guide to the European Union or bfgtoeu for short. 17 classes in our school participated in this exciting and innovative programme. We created an E.U. smoothie, had mini E.U. elections and designed our own euro notes. We are so grateful to all our teachers for taking on this programme. Thank you to Miss Vaughan, Miss Keating, Ms Burke, Ms Carey, Ms Sheedy, Mr O’Neill, Ms O’Riordan, Mrs O’Neill, Mr Walsh, Ms Boland, Ms Flynn, Mr McCarthy, Ms Noonan, Ms O’Brien, Ms Murphy, Mr O’Regan and Mr Willis
Thanks to the guidance of Dr Emmanuelle Schon Quinlivan, we got to participate in a zoom where we got to listen to President of the E.U parliament Roberta Metsola. We also got to meet Commissioner Vera Jourava through zoom.
Our class participated in an etwinning project called ‘Sharing our stories’. Scoil Ghobnatan was partnered with a school in Romania. We had loads of fun discovering our shared culture and heritage. We created sharing our stories projects based on local personalities such as Captain Ocana and Thomas Russell. The work we completed was displayed in Irelands first Europe festival in City hall. We were honoured to attend many E.U. events throughout the year. We attended the Launch of the E.U. hub in U.C.C back in November. It was great to meet many schools who were as excited about learning about the E.U. as we were.
Our school participated in an exchange with a school in France called ‘Ecole Notre Dame du Sacre Coeur’ which was organised by Dr Emmanuelle. We shared Irish stories, letters, songs and dances with them. They became our friends, and we were so lucky to meet some of them at the Europe festival in city hall. On the 8th of May, the 46 children visited Scoil Ghobnatan. We played games, shared performances, showed them around Mallow- this experience really just shows what the European Union is all about.
We were presented with the award in U.C.C. and it was a very proud day for our school.