St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

On Saturday, three of our students will represent our school in the National Finals of Mathletes. Sam from 5th class and Lester and Eduard from 6th class will be travelling to chq in the city centre to compete against 57 other primary school students. We’ve blogged quite a lot about our experiences of Mathletes and Khan Academy and you can find all our posts about them here. We thought that it would be fitting to interview the finalists from the school – and Oisín was the man for the job! Best of luck to the boys in the finals – only 60 primary school students qualified so... 

We are learning about Summer this month and can’t wait to see all of the beautiful bugs and animals and minibeasts again! We hope to see ladybirds, snails, caterpillars, butterflies, ants, bees, bloodsuckers and spiders! We decided to make our own minibeasts today because it doesn’t look like the Summer has come yet! You will need: a knife, an apple, peanut butter, chocolate chips and sesame sticks. First ask an adult to chop the apple in half. Take out the stem and seeds. Then you spread 6 blobs of peanut butter on the back of the apple. Next you place chocolate chips on the peanut... 

Here in Ms. Mitchell’s class we are learning about Summer this month! We are looking forward to spotting lots of changes in the world around us now. We will be looking closely to see a change in the weather, people’s clothes, the food we eat, new flowers growing and all of the new bugs and animals that come out for Summer. But before all of this starts to happen we all closed our eyes and used our senses to think of what happens in the world around us in Summer. We tried to remember all of the things that we see, hear, smell, feel and taste during the Summer. Next we shared our memories... 

We’ve been working hard to record our signs of Spring using Greenwave. We really missed Mr Curran who retired last year as he’s always brilliant for noticing the signs of Spring! Here’s our dashboard: Some of the classes have been following the weather forecast during News2day on the RTE player and discussing what the meteorological terms mean.  

Bright and early on Saturday morning, primary and secondary students gathered in DCU to compete in the Mathletes Leinster finals. Among all the students were nine St Peter’s boys from 5th and 6th class, who had qualified due to their hard work and dedication. Only 500 students in the country from 5th class to 3rd year qualified so the St Peter’s team had a lot to proud of. Special mention to the parents, grandparents, brothers and sister who came along to cheer them on! The day began with a team event designed by The Think Academy. The challenge was based on CSI techniques and required... 

Since February, we’ve been taking part in the Mathletes Schools Challenge. You can read all about our progress here , here and here. We’ve been holding strong in the top 7 of the leaderboards in the country (even over the Easter holidays) and recently we received word that 18 of our 5th and 6th class students have qualified for the Leinster finals of the Student Challenge. This is a remarkable achievement, especially considering that only eighty 5th and 6th class students in Leinster qualified. Our Maths whizzes in 5th and 6th would be able to tell you that 23% of the eligible Leinster... 

Ms. Mitchell’s class studied the topic of Sound for the Discover Science Project;                                                                               read on to find out what we discovered! Exploring what we know and thinking aloud First we had a quick” think, pair, share” about what we think of when we hear the word “Sound”. Next we shared our thoughts and wrote them on the board in a thought shower, some were very interesting! Afterwards we decided to start thinking about what sound actually is? We had some super thoughts! Nathan k... 

In the latest ‘reflection’ post from the Eircom Junior Spiders Awards, we share some of the exciting interviews we gave on the day. We were so lucky to be interviewed by Ireland’s largest independent radio station, Today FM. Juliette from Today FM interviewed Caoilynn, Tommy, James, Oisín and Ms. Brennan. It was an amazing experience, especially considering that tens of thousands of people listen to this station every day! Well done to our brilliant students who did us proud as always. Listen to the clips from the 1pm and 4pm news below! Thanks to Today FM for letting us put... 

After many months of learning about stop-motion animations, apps, lighting, sound, props and recording… here it is. Our complete Creative Schools Awards project in one massive blogpost! So… here it is! Our project has taken us four months to complete. We decided to use our love of ICT and Art in as creative and interesting a way as possible in putting together a stop-motion animation project. We got the idea as early in the year, during Culture Night 2013, our local theatre (The Mermaid) ran a number of events on the night, including children’s animation workshops. We in St. Peter’s... 

The 2014 Eircom Junior Spiders winners were announced at a ceremony at Google HQ in Dublin today. Hosted by RTÉ’s Aidan Power, the awards recognise and reward primary and post primary students for the innovative ways they use the internet, especially around website development, school blogs and design. At primary level, the Mega Spiders have three categories – Best Project, Best School Blog and Best School Website. There is also a Grand Prix award for the overall winner. We were delighted to win both awards for Best School Blog and the Grand Prix! “What a fantastic bunch of winners we...