St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

‘Wednesday for Parents’ returns to one of our most popular types of posts this week – what’s on over the school holidays! Hopefully there’ll be lovely weather over the two weeks so we’ve included a nice mixture of indoor and outdoor activities. The Mermaid Theatre in Bray has a number of events for children over the Easter break. They’re screening (the original) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on Sunday 13th April at 2pm. Tickets cost €5 and can be booked here. Then, on the 15th and 16th April, the Mermaid welcome spellbinding Children’s Theatre... 

You may have seen in an earlier post today that we’re currently taking part in a handwriting competition. Today’s ‘Wednesday for Parents’ suggests a number of links that may be useful to you if your child needs extra help to improve their handwriting. As always, your experience is invaluable and we’d love to hear your tips for helping with handwriting. Let us know in the comments! Our first link this evening comes from NALA and is absolutely excellent. We’ve featured content from NALA before and their work is always of high quality. This publication is called... 

Today we want to direct your attention to the Scoilnet site – and in particular, the section for parents on the Scoilnet site! The Scoilnet site hosts a variety of articles and activities for students, parents and teachers. For parents, there are articles on topical issues, information on special needs and links to information from the Department of Education. You can access the parents homepage here. To introduce you to the parents section on Scoilnet, we’ve chosen three links that might be of interest! This is the ‘Focus on’ section – an archive of all the topics... 

Welcome to our second-last post in Helping with Homework mini-series. All of the posts in the mini-series can be found on the website here. In previous posts, we discussed the difference between helping younger students with homework and helping older students. Today, we’re going to focus on study skills and revision for students in the older classes, particularly as they move towards secondary school. It can be difficult to juggle homework in different subjects and also to revise for exams and class tests. We have 5 simple tips so that you can help your child to cope with study skills. 1.... 

Our ‘Wednesday for Parents’ mini-series on helping with homework continues this week with advice on helping your child with their reading homework. During World Book Day, we found this statistic that really helps to emphasise how important your child’s reading homework is:   source So how can you help with homework? In the senior end of the school, your child will generally not need you to ‘hear’ their reading every single day. However, it is important that you check that they understand what they’ve read. Ask them to tell you five things that they read... 

This week, we continue our series on helping with homework by focusing on learning homework. Learning homework can be the hardest part of homework to do well because it’s not as measurable as written homework. A child can achieve the same amount of work in 3 minutes of focused learning homework one day, as he would on another day of an hour’s distracted learning! Learning homework will usually take the form of four different types of learning: Spellings Tables Gaeilge General learning – maths vocab, dates in history etc. Our tips include: Test your child by mixing up the vocab... 

This Wednesday, we kick off a series on helping your child with homework. Our series is going to give you a number of simple tips to help you to help your child with all aspects of their homework. We want to know what works for you and what you’d like advice on. We’d love to hear from you! To get us started, we brainstormed our best homework tips at a staff meeting earlier this week. We hope this post will be edited regularly, as we get more and more tips and advice! Here’s the structure of our mini-series: Week 1 (today): General tips and links Week 2: How to help your child... 

One year ago, today, St Peter’s published its first blog post. This is our 289th post in that year and as we announced yesterday, Aaron Gray posted our 1000th comment this week. With this in mind, we postponed this week’s ‘Wednesday for Parents’ to coincide with the birthday, so that we could focus on a very special topic – the blog. So, why do we blog? And why do we believe it’s worth it? We asked the people who know best, our students! I like blogging because it’s really fun and you can see what’s going on in the school – Johnny I like when... 

‘I’m freezing!’ ‘It’s miserable out there today.’ ‘Is it ever going to stop raining?’ In Ireland, we’re all a bit weather-obsessed, but this Winter has taken things to a new level! This week, we’ve decided to embrace the obsession and to make it the focus for ‘Wednesday for Parents’. We give you a number of suggestions that are perfect to learn a bit more about how the weather works! To help out, we’ve included a list of what you’d need to carry out the experiment. Make your own frost with this experiment. You’ll... 

There’s a couple of reasons for today’s post! The first is the horrible weather lately that’s been keeping many of us indoors. The second is the high volume of colds and stomach bugs that have been doing the rounds, also keeping many of us indoors. Finally, the Write-A-Book project has reminded many of us just how much the kids in St Peter’s love to draw! Today’s post provides a number of suggestions for drawing projects at home – we hope you find it useful! What about a daily drawing challenge? This one is a fantastic one, sourced from here.   This is...