Creative Schools is a flagship initiative of the Creative Ireland Programme to enable the creative potential of every child. The Arts Council leads Creative Schools in partnership with the Department of Education and the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media. It is a two year developmental programme and each school is allocated a creative associate who works with each school to create a creative plan.
In our school, we celebrated creative arts week through organising a range of activities for the children which included; a woodwork workshop, circus acts, drumming workshop, drama activities, a music generation workshop with Gráinne Hambly and digital coding workshops. The children thoroughly enjoyed these workshops. We also participated in the Digital Arts Flag initiative where each class participated in online art, drama and music workshops. We successfully received the digital arts flag from our involvement in the initiative.
We chose drama as our creative focus for the second year of the creative schools programme. We were very lucky to have Midie Corcoran as our drama practitioner who did drama workshops with the children as well as writing a script ‘The Demon Horse God of Saturn’ with the 5th & 6th class children for our creative showcase. All the classes participated in the drama and we incorporated dance, movement and music into the performance. It was a wonderful success and the children thoroughly enjoyed participating in the drama.