St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

You may have noticed our jaw-dropping ‘in numbers‘ piece on the blog – well, unsurprisingly, there were too many numbers associated with Mathletes and Khan Academy to choose from so we gave them a post of their own! As we explained in a previous post, 5th and 6th classes are taking part in Mathletes at the moment. At this stage, the competition is in full swing and the students are really enjoying it, but even more importantly, they’re putting in huge effort into improving their Maths! So how have we been getting on? See for yourself! 3 – We’re currently in... 

5th class recently took part in the Bord Gáis Energy Student Theatre Awards. The challenge was to write a short play on the theme of Friendship. It was a great opportunity to write in a new format. Today’s scene comes from Johnny, who wrote a play about two teachers in the staffroom. It’s a play about friendship between the principal and the teacher – but who’s the most important friend to have? Johnny’s actors were Oisín and AaronG. We intended on recording Leon’s comedy today about Red, Ed and Fred, but as you can guess from the names, things got too confusing.... 

3rd Class have been learning the song ‘My Hat Has Three Corners’. The song was written about a particular style of hat that had three corners. The melody was composed by a German composer called Franz Schubert. It is an action song that gets progressively harder as we had to leave our certain words in each verse and replace it with actions. Here is a short video of Szymon, Finn and Chris trying the action song for themselves. Well done boys! IMG 0022[1] from St Peter’s, Bray on Vimeo.  

3rd Class with the help of Mr. Kinsella and Ms. Byrne have been working really hard to create their very own Stop Motion videos. Stop motion is an animation technique to makes objects appear to move on their own. We decided to use Lego as our main prop as it one of our favorite things. We worked in groups of three to come up with characters, props and storylines for our animations. We moved the Lego and props in small increments between each frame creating the illusion of movement. We then played the series of frames as a continuous sequence to create our movies.  Here is our first stop motion... 

  We’ve always enjoyed taking part in Engineer’s Week activities – back in 2005, we were the Senior Engineering Class of Ireland and the trophy was one of the coolest we’ve ever seen! This year, we really enjoyed Engineer’s Week. You can see an overview of all of our activities here. We were so excited to get an email from the STEPS co-ordinator, Sylvia Leatham, to tell us that we had won a prize for our efforts! Here’s the press release from STEPS. Sylvia had very kind comments about our work: Your blog gave us a great sense of what you did – it looks... 

We are big fans of Roald Dahl in our class; we decided to read one of his books after all the interesting things that we read about him during World Book Day! We chose The Twits. We talk about each chapter with our talk buddies after reading it, and then we write a summary in our copies. We make sure to talk about the beginning, middle and end every time. Sometimes we chat about how the characters are feeling while we are reading the book, we even try to imagine how we would feel if we were them! We are always laughing at the mean tricks that the Twits play on eachother! Here are some of our favourite... 

On Tuesday boys from 3rd– 6th class travelled down to beautiful Avondale to take part in a Cross Country Athletics competition. The boys ran in relay teams of four and did our school proud. It was a tough course but each of the boys tried their best and gave it their all until they reached the finish line. We were blessed that the sun was shining and we all had a wonderful day. ‘Everyone in 3rd class really enjoyed the cross country running.’ – Szymon ‘It was a hard course but we tried our best and had fun.’ –Finn ‘Each of us showed great school spirit cheering on the boys from... 

Recently, 5th class took part in the Bord Gais Energy Student Theatre Awards. We already recorded plays from Luke and Andy here. Today, we have scenes from AaronJ and Ameesh. Aaron’s play is about two boys in a park – both wanting to make friends, but too awkward to start the conversation. His actors were Alan and Johnny. Ameesh’s play is about making friends with a new neighbour. His actors are Ben and Sam. Well done to the writers and to the actors!  

Last month, 5th class learned all about Picasso. They drew portraits using unusual shapes and proportion. They then coloured in their drawings using all the colours of the rainbow! Check out their beautiful work below:        

There were lots of puzzled faces during our lesson about working as a scientist today, following on from our lesson on observation and inference earlier in the week.  Scientists have to think creatively and also have to work with the evidence, even when they don’t have all the information that they’d like to have. Today, we adapted this lesson to encourage creative thinking, working together and changing theories when new evidence emerges! Again, we have the STEM course that Ms Sexton is attending to thank for the idea! We used Vine as it’s a great way to record short video...