Blackrock College CADLC/Library
Website for the Blackrock College Library/Creative Arts and Digital Learning Centre
One Thursday a month students come to the library for Thursday Tunes. It’s an opportunity for Students from across all year groups to portray their musical talent. Students can sing, play an instrument or just come and listen. The last Thursday Tunes took place in February 2020 and we would like to thank the following students for their wonderful performances
Mark Landers
Aidan Canavan
Robert Murphy
Peter O’Grady
Ciaran Drohan
Adam Harvey
Colum Corless
This year’s literacy day took place on September 29th 2020. This year’s focus was on raising awareness of the abundance of notes, books, knowledge, literature we already have at our disposal.
Dave Rudden, author of Knights of the Borrowed Dark gave a very entertaining and engaging virtual visit to 2nd years. All classes remained in their rooms and connected via MS Teams. The chat function was chockablock with students sharing what stories they liked or didn’t like, what makes a good ending and lots more.
Denise Deegan gave a really interesting virtual Screen Writing workshop with fifth Year Students. She referenced some great movies like Saving Private Ryan and showed some sample pages from her new feature script “Tough Old Broad”. Hopefully, this workshop will be the start of some budding future screen writers.
Last year, as part of Literacy Day, students had to solve a murder mystery where Mr Niall Byrne, History teacher, was found guilty of murdering Sherlock Holmes. This year students were given the task of helping Mr MacGinty break Mr Byrne out of prison. It was all done digitally, via MS One Note, where students had to solve a literacy or numeracy clue in one section to move to the next. 141 students took part in the competition. Well done to PJ Tehan (2nd Year), Conor McCarron (2nd Year), Mark McClean (2nd Year) and Nico Coll (6th Year) who each won a €20 One4All voucher.
This year’s literacy Day took place on 1st October 2019 and the theme was be a “discerning reader and writer”.
Three authors visited students during the week of literacy day
Tony Curtis, poet spoke to 3rd years on Tuesday, 1st October. He was very energetic and engaging with students, even inviting some to recite poetry in front of the year group. Tony has a fantastic way of bringing poetry to life.
Denise Deegan, is a teenage and historical fiction author. She did two writing workshops with 5th and 6th years on Tuesday 1st October. Denise’s central theme was the importance of character building in a story.
Dave Rudden, author of Knights of the Borrowed Dark spoke to 2nd years on Thursday, 3rd October. Dave was very entertaining and engaging with the students. Dave’s books are about teenagers who have superpowers and understand horror movies. He kept the boys enthralled for the entire session and showed the value of reading for pleasure.
A murder mystery competition was held in the Creative Arts and Digital Learning Centre to promote murder mystery books and to help students engage with numeracy and literacy. The concept was that Sherlock Holmes was murdered and three suspects were Mr. Alan MacGinty, Mr Niall Byrne and Ms Aoife Ryan. Students who entered were given a murder case file which included a police report, witness statements from Ms Nolan, Mr Herlihy and Ms Markey, cctv camera footage and a newspaper article. Students got to learn about bias, inference, deduction and attention to detail. There was also a link with numeracy where they had to work out time through the time, speed and distance formula. Second years helped create a crime scene for visual effect. Art students created a body outline poster and Blackrock TV did a wonderful promotional clip. Overall it was a very fun event and well done to Harvey Lavelle (5th Year), Nicholas Kelly (TY), Conor Casey (3rd Year), Gavin McNabb (2nd Year) and Harry Brady (2nd Year) for correctly working out that Mr Byrne was the guilty suspect.