Projects

St Patrick's NS is proud to take part in a number of initiatives aimed at your child's development and appreciation of the world around them. These projects are a combination of practical (hands-on) and academic activities.

Projects
  • Student Council
  • Active School Flag
  • Active School Week 
  • Amber Flag
  • Blue Star Programme
  • Green Schools Programme
  • STEM - Curious Minds
  • Creative Schools Programme
  • Intel Mini-Scientist

Student Council

Role and Purpose of the Student Council in St. Patrick’s N.S. Clogh

St. Patrick’s N.S. Clogh believes that students have a vital role to play in creating a positive and welcoming school environment conducive to learning and happiness. We believe that a Student Council plays a requisite role in achieving this.

The Role of the Student Council in St. Patrick’s N.S. Clogh

The role of the Student Council is to:

  • Provide an opportunity for pupils to voice their opinions and offer suggestions in relation to many aspects of school life and thereby play a very significant role in improving our school
  • Act as a channel of communication within the school organisation, between pupils and between home and school
  • Encourage pupils to organise events in St. Patrick’s N.S. Clogh and to represent the school in a positive way during these events. 

Students from Third, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Class are eligible to be on the Student Council. Student representatives are required to be active participants in the Student Council, to attend meetings regularly, participate in activities and be a role model for other students.  

Active School Flag

Active Flag awarded December 2023: Well done to the Active Flag Committee and teachers for all their hard work over the last 2 years. A flag raising ceremony was held in school on Wednesday, 20th December 2023 with the Active Flag Committee in charge of proceedings.

The aim of the Active Schools Flag is to encourage schools to be more active, more often. It links in with all of the work we are doing throughout the year to maintain wellbeing – being active, getting exercise, taking care of our minds and bodies. For more information on the Active Schools Initiative, see Active School Flag | More Schools, More Active, More Often.

Our Active School Motto is: ‘Hop, Skip, Jump and Play, Let’s Get Active Everyday‘

Active School Week

The Active School Committee had great fun organising a fun filled circuit-training style day for the whole school. Committee members worked together to organise and teach all classes groups the various stations. Activities included elements from across the Physical Education curriculum.

During Active week, classes had small daily challenges to complete as part of movement breaks within the classroom. This ranged from completing Jumping Jacks, Squats, Yoga poses to some dances from Go-Noodle and a myriad of other activities. This was great fun, especially with some of the dance moves that our teachers tried! 

Amber Flag

We are very proud to have become an Amber Flag school in 2023/2024. Our Students Council led various initiatives during year, which with the collective student body, resulted is our school achieving the Amber Flag award. This award is presented for demonstrating excellence in promoting positive mental health.

The Pieta Amber Flag Initiative recognises the individual efforts of primary and secondary schools, youth reach, third level institutions, community groups, clubs and companies to create healthy, inclusive environments that support mental well-being.

Blue Star Programme

The Blue Star Programme is an education initiative for primary school pupils across Ireland. The idea of the Programme is simple: to foster better understanding and knowledge of the European Union and how it affects the lives of Irish citizens among primary pupils through classroom projects and activities.

Pupils of all ages, from primary schools all over Ireland, are challenged to get creative and think about Europe by carrying out projects in relation to four key elements: the history, geography, culture and creativity, and Institutions of the EU. 

We earned our first Blue Star Flag in 2021/2022. During 2024/2025, we will be working towards our 4th Blue Star Flag. 

Green Schools Programme

Green-Schools is an international environmental education programme designed to encourage and acknowledge whole school action for the environment. It helps pupils to recognise the importance of environmental issues. Green-Schools is both a programme and an award scheme. A Green Flag is awarded to schools that complete the seven steps of a programme for a specific theme beginning with litter and waste. The programme is operated and co-ordinated by the Environmental Education Unit of An Taisce (FEE member for Ireland). Find out more from this link. 

Clogh N.S. first registered with Green-Schools in September 2008. After following a two year programme on Litter and Waste we were awarded our first Green Flag in May 2010. Since then, we have achieved 7 Green Flags. The 7 Green Flags were achieved for the school’s work in the following areas:

  • Litter and Waste
  • Energy
  • Water
  • Transport
  • Biodiversity
  • Global Citizenship and Litter and Waste
  • Global Citizenship and Energy

We are currently working towards a 8th Green Flag based on the theme of Global Citizenship and Marine Environment. The school’s Green Code for this theme is:

  • ‘Save the power for even one hour
  • Let the world know and the energy will flow’ 

Curious Minds

Curious Minds (formerly Discovery Primary Science and Maths)

The Discover Science and Maths Awards is a project that St. Patrick’s N.S. takes part in on a regular basis. It is an award given to schools for excellence in Science and Maths. It has been co-ordinated by all class teachers. The children are given the opportunity to explore Science experiments and Maths concepts and showcase their findings. The curriculum is divided into strands and each class group is given a strand to ensure every area is covered. 

The Discover Primary Science and Maths Award had two levels of awards: Certificate of Excellence and Plaque of Excellence. We are very proud of our Discover Primary Science and Maths Plaques of STEM Excellence, which were awarded in 2018/19, 2019/20 and 2020/21.

Curious Minds Awards (formerly Discover Primary Science and Maths Awards) has three levels of awards: Silver (formerly Certificate of Excellence), Gold (formerly Plaque of Excellence) and Platinum. 


St. Patrick's NS Clogh was the only Kilkenny school to be awarded a Curious Minds Platinum award in 2022/2023. We were awarded a Gold award for 2023/2024. During 2024/2025 we will be working towards our 6th Curious Minds Award. 

Creative Schools

Creative Schools is a flagship initiative of the Creative Ireland Programme to enable the creative potential of every child. It aims to put the arts and creativity at the heart of children and young people’s lives. We were delighted to be a recipient of this award for the 2023/2024 school year. Our overall goal is to integrate creativity and fun into our approach to learning across all curriculum areas at St. Patrick's NS Clogh.

We are delighted that we will be given the opportunity to work with a creative associate for the duration of the project. Creative Associates are artists, creative practitioners and/or educators with an understanding of the arts and creativity and its potential to transform the lives of children and young people. Creative Associates are assigned to match the needs of schools to arts and creative opportunities in their locality. 

2023/2024 -  We have enjoyed working with our Creative Associate during the past year. A series of workshops were hosted where we explored and discussed what it means to be creative. Some of the themes that we enjoyed working on as part of these workshops were mime, construction using recycling and printing using nature. 6th class created a fantastic blog as part of the programme for our school Instagram. Students voted for pottery and print as the focus of year 2 and we look forward to seeing how this theme evolves during the year. 


Intel Mini-Scientist

Ms Keane’s room has participated in the Intel-Mini Scientist Competition since 2019 as part of our Primary Science and Maths Awards. Students choose an area of focus from the Science curriculum (Living Things, Energy and Forces, Materials, Environmental Awareness and Care) and create a project on their chosen topic. The idea of the projects is to encourage children to work scientifically and learn by investigating, with designing and making another potential aspect of their projects. Children are encouraged to explore, plan, and make models and functional objects in order to solve practical problems.  

We host an Intel Mini-Scientist STEM Showcase annually, with children demonstrating experiments to other classes and parents are invited in to see our work. During 2024/2025 we will be working towards our 6th Intel-Mini Scientist award. 

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Tel: 056 444 2374
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St. Patrick's NS

Boneyarrow, Clogh,

Castlecomer, Co. Kilkenny

R95 YP5W

Ireland

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