St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

On Saturday, three of our students – Eduard and Lester Grefaldeo from 6th class and Sam Smith from 5th class attended the Mathletes National Finals. The day began with a session with The Think Academy, who organised a funfair themed maths challenge – including designing the fastest roller-coaster and finding profits for the candyfloss. The boys thoroughly enjoyed this session, just like they enjoyed the CSI themed challenge in DCU. There were 30 students each from 5th class, 6th class, 1st year, 2nd year and 3rd year so chq was full of students, families and teachers. The Grefaldeos... 

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... 

Last week, Stephen, the Community Garda, came in to visit us to talk to us about the work of the Gardaí. We’d loads of questions for him and we learned a lot from him. We recorded a podcast about what we learned from him. Earlier in the week, we noticed on the @gardainfo Twitter account that they were having a Q&A session with a member of the Garda Dog Unit. We posted questions, as did our friends in Cloghan’s Hill School. We storified the answers to make them easier to read. Twitter is a cool way to access information on topics that we’re interested in – we’d... 

Recently, 5th class read ‘War Horse’ by Michael Morpurgo as their class novel and really enjoyed it. We had a Twitter Q&A session with the Irish National Stud to answer some of the more technical questions from the book and we blogged about that here. As part of a prize for our excellent attendance, we watched ‘War Horse’ the film over the last few wet lunchtimes. It was really interesting watching it as the film of a book that we’d recently read. Our teacher noticed that we discussed the story a lot as we went along and we kept pointing out similarities and differences... 

This week’s student of the week award went to Ryan Kennedy! Ryan worked hard for the past few weeks to make his written homework better, he had longer sentences with much more detail this week. He also improved on his maths scores and got 100% in both is spellings and tables test. Well done Ryan!  

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... 

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...