Health Promoting School

This year in Holy Trinity N.S. we have been working very hard to become a health promoting school. A health promoting school has to develop a plan to develop the holistic health of the children. Over time this would mean improving our physical health through food and exercise and developing our mental well-being.

We surveyed the entire school community - staff, parents and children. Focus groups were also carried out with the children, in order to get a clearer insight into their surveys. As a result we decided to focus on the topic of well-being this year. We then came up with an action plan and the following are the actions which we have taken so far:

• A "Friendship Squad" has been set up. This involves children from fifth and sixth class teaching playground games to the children in junior and senior infants. 
• Friendship benches have been places on the Junior and Middle classes yard. The idea is that if you have no one to play with, you can sit here and someone will come along and ask you to play.
• A friendship week was held in February. Throughout this week the pupils were taught friendship skills along with many other friendship themed lessons. They learned the Bruno Mars song "Count on me" at assembly and created a whole school friendship chain. The aim is to encourage good friendship skills and promote kindness and empathy among our pupils.
• Chalk was requested by some very clever children in our focus group who noted that we needed more activities for children who might like a more creative pastime on the yard. Check out some of the children's chalk drawings below. The have made our school yard even prettier than it was before. 
• Mindfulness classes and yoga classes are being provided by our Health Promoting Schools parent representative Deirdre. These begin in third class and run right up to sixth class.
• Classes are engaging in brain breaks throughout the day to avoid too much sitting time. Teachers have been using resources such as gonoodle, the running track etc. 
• We do super troopers every night for homework, because a healthy lifestyle needs to happen at home and in school. 
• We have put up notice boards in our halla in order to make the school more visually appealing.
• The courtyard area has also been improved with some beautiful posters and a bench is being ordered for this area. 
• Motivational posters have been placed around the school in order to motivate everyone in our community.
• Other initiatives such as challenge to change, sports teams, green schools, active schools etc. are also extremely influential to developing positive mental health. 
• We continue to enforce our anti-bullying campaign which was begun in 2014. 

This is just the start of our health promoting journey. We cannot wait to continue developing HTNS as a vibrant and happy place.