St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

Welcome to this week’s ‘Wednesday for Parents’! As you may know, one of our success stories last week was our involvement in Mathletes, well documented here. Mathletes is a free tournament that aims to change the teaching and learning of Maths in Ireland. It’s an online and in-person competition that uses Khan Academy as a tool to improve the student’s maths skills and knowledge. Today’s ‘Wednesday for Parents’ is all about how you can use Khan Academy as a parent to improve your child’s Maths skills. So, what is Khan Academy? Khan Academy... 

Welcome back to a new year in St Peter’s and to the first ‘Wednesday for Parents’ post of the new year! To start the year, we’ve chosen to look at this year’s programme for Culture Night 2014. This year, it’s on the 19th of September – a Friday. It’s an amazing night where you can access venues and events around the country for free. Although all events are free, some may need to be booked in advance – which is why we’re drawing attention to them nice and early! Locally, the Mermaid Arts Centre has a workshop in the afternoon with Signal Arts. Last year’s... 

For many of our past pupils and brothers and sisters of our current pupils, tomorrow is a big day. We want to wish everyone waiting on Leaving Cert results the very best of luck. The wait for results is often a stressful one (for student and family!), but there are a number of resources around the web to help make the process easier. SpunOut.ie is, as always, a fantastic resource, with lots of helpful tips on dealing with the stress of results day. Their article here contains lots of advice. The website is well worth a browse with lots of advice on finding accommodation for 3rd level education... 

This year, we’ve covered a variety of topics as part of our weekly ‘Wednesday for Parents’ articles. As this is the last ‘Wednesday for Parents’ before the Summer, we decided to provide a round-up of all the topics we’ve covered this year, minus the seasonal ones about midterm activities etc that mightn’t be as useful! Thanks for all your comments and suggestions this year – if there’s anything you’d like us to cover in the new school year, let us know! Online activities to help your child with place value Teaching your child about fire... 

This week for ‘Wednesday for Parents’, we’re delighted to publish a guest post from the fantastic Summer Buzz – we’ve spoken about Buzz on many occasions on the blog and you’re bound to have noticed the name popping up in the comments! We have been so lucky to have a Twitter (and real-life friend) like Buzz and when we wanted to talk about ways to get stuck into Summer reading, Maria O’Sullivan was the one to contact! Thanks a million to Maria (and Buzz) for putting together such a brilliant blog post. You can find all previous ‘Wednesday for Parents’... 

Sports Day last week, standardized tests are (mostly) finished, chatter about the school tour and the student-teacher soccer match… it’s official, Summer is here! This week’s Wednesday for Parents provides a number of ideas for activities to try over the summer holidays – hence, ‘The Bucket and Spade List’ – (can you sense how gutted I was to realise when I googled it that quite a few people thought of that name before me? Over the next week or two, we’ll be talking to students and staff about their Bucket and Spade List for 2014 (and we have a very... 

This week’s ‘Wednesday for Parents’ suggests websites to teach children about money management. Obviously the best training comes from managing pocket money and savings, but the two websites we’re going to show you tonight also give your child a sense of the challenges and struggles that come with managing money in real life. The first website came to us from our great friend Ms Beauchamp from St Brigid’s in Greystones (@merrybeau1 on Twitter). She recommends Moneyville.ie, which seems to be more directed at the family setting with its section for parents here.... 

It’s no secret that we’re big fans of using online resources to improve maths among our students – previous Wednesday for Parents topics have covered place value and fractions and we’ve been really involved in the Mathletes Challenge using Khan Academy. We also use online resources to revise and learn more about other subjects – and today we’re focusing on SESE (Social, Environmental and Scientific Education) which is the name in the curriculum for History, Geography and Science. Although there are many good websites for world history and geography out there... 

The weather over the Easter holidays reminded us all that Summer is on the way and this week’s Wednesday for Parents focuses on getting healthy as we all finally come out of hibernation and crawl out from under the duvet! We were delighted to see our students arrive back after the holidays looking fresh and healthy after all the playing outdoors. One of our priorities in St Peter’s is to encourage healthy living amongst our students  – mainly thanks to Paddy! Along with our PE sessions, we’re lucky to welcome Tommy, our GAA coach, in on Fridays. We also have weekly athletic... 

Welcome to our weekly online newsletter – the St Peter’s Post! We’d a really exciting week with the arrival of Scientific Sue. We were delighted to welcome five local schools to see Sue in action and they were all really impressed by Sue and by our beautiful school! It was lovely to be able to share our prize with them and we’re very grateful to Engineers Ireland for organising it. Here are the week’s headlines: You can read all about Scientific Sue’s visit here! We’re now on our Easter holidays – 3rd class had great fun yesterday at their Easter...