We are delighted to welcome visiting Erasmus+ teachers from Istituto Barbarigo Venice to St Joseph’s Special School during their visit to Ireland. The Barbarigo Institute is part of Venice’s long tradition of international and cultural education, with strong involvement in Erasmus+ programmes promoting collaboration, learning, and cultural exchange.
As part of their visit, staff and pupils enjoyed a wonderful trip to Spiddal, taking in the beauty of the Connemara coastline and sharing time together outside the classroom. 
Our pupils were proud to showcase life and learning at St Joseph’s, and it was lovely for everyone to share experiences, ideas, and plenty of laughter along the way. Erasmus+ partnerships create valuable opportunities for schools to learn from one another and celebrate inclusion, creativity, and collaboration across Europe.

A busy time at school while we worked on preparing our Butterfly Garden for its new residents! We've been carefully feeding and taking care of over 100 caterpillars 🐛  learning all about what they like to eat and how they grow so big so fast! 

Soon they will all make their cocoons and become beautiful butterflies 🦋🦋 

We hope they will stick around in our beautiful butterfly sanctuary..  either way we're all learning loads about the butterfly lifecycle, growth and food  
🐛🥬🤞🌺🤞🌷🤞🦋

Day 1 of our Bike Week was a fantastic success! The TY students from the JES School cycled to our school and brought great energy and excitement with them. They proudly showed off their bikes to our pupils and encouraged them to label the different bike parts using flashcards. We definitely had some budding bike experts among us — many pupils were superb at identifying every part!
Pupils, staff, and JES students also enjoyed delicious refreshments from the Barista Bus, whose staff were incredibly patient, friendly, and welcoming to everyone throughout the day.
To round off the event, the JES students helped choose winners for our colouring competition in each class, which created plenty of excitement. Some classes even gathered outside to wave off the JES students as they began their cycle home.
It was a lovely, wholesome day filled with fun, learning, community spirit, and friendship between our two school communities.

Please see posters below of our planned events for Bike Week 2026. An exciting week ahead at school. Hopefully the sun will shine for the planned activities!

St. Joseph's were very lucky to be offered a BLAST project with practitioner Kendra Rabbitte. She engaged with most of our pupils in the junior and senior end of the school during the month of February. The pupils really enjoyed their lessons with Kendra where they explored music through movement, props, voice and most of all through fun. She was so inclusive of every pupil in her lesson, it was lovely to witness. We are applying again for the incoming school year of 2026/2027. Fingers and toes crossed our pupils get to have another lovely experience with the arts.

It has been a busy week of creativity in the Wonder Workshop.
Pupils began by creating St Patrick’s Day themed snakes. This activity encouraged pupils to explore pattern making using repetition and mark making, with lots of imaginative designs emerging.
Aifric and the pupils also had conversations around abstract shapes. Pupils looked at painted green forms and discussed what they could see in them, linking their ideas back to the theme of St Patrick’s Day.
As part of our BLAST project, pupils began the first stage of their printmaking work with artist Dee Deegan. Using printing ink and stencil card, they experimented with printing simple shapes, laying a strong foundation for the work we will continue in the coming weeks. Watch this space.
Students in Senior 2 also made use of the flower presses they built earlier this year. Using flowers from the Home Economics classroom, they carefully pressed the blooms and we look forward to seeing how they dry and how they might be used in future projects.