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14 Feb
Caoilynn's BEE-AUTIFUL card!

Caoilynn’s BEE-AUTIFUL card!

14 Feb

wordle -start of week

Welcome to Engineers Week in St Peter’s! This morning in 5th class, we started thinking about what we know about engineers.

We started by thinking individually about words that come to mind when we hear the word ‘engineer’. We also drew pictures of what we think an engineer looks like.

Next, we worked in pairs to discuss what we know about engineers.

Then we shared our work with the rest of the class.

We made a Wordle to show what we think an engineer does, at the start of Engineers Week. We’re going to make another one on Friday to assess what we’ve learned in the meantime. We wonder if it’ll change much!

We use Think-Pair-Share a lot to get us thinking, but the Wordle is a new addition. It was suggested in a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) course with the RDS that Ms Sexton is attending at the moment. You can learn more about the course here.

This type of assessment is important so that the teacher knows where the class is starting from, so that he/she can plan the lessons more effectively. Assessment that feeds into teaching and learning like this is called formative assessment or assessment for learning.

Updated: Here’s our Wordle from the end of the week. Look carefully to see what we learned during Engineer’s Week 2014!wordle - end of week

14 Feb

Today, we investigated circuits and Electric Paint. Part of the work of an engineer is to design and to build everyday items so that they work better! Electric Paint can be used instead of wires to conduct electricity. This is our finished work! We used a Vine to show off a selection of them!

We’ve been working on a kit from Bare Conductive, which you can find out more about here. We’re big fans of Electric Paint and we used it previously in our school-winning project for the Mini-Scientist. We had to let the paint dry.

13 Feb

WED PARENTS

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.

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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 we work in groups to blog – Carl and Jordan

We get to share our work with the school and people on the Internet. I like the animations the best. – Dylan

My favourite thing on the blog is making it fun for other children – Dylan

It’s a good thing to be proud of your work – Abbi

I like saying nice stuff to other classes in my comments. I like the way you can change the language on the blog so when you go on holidays to other countries, you can show them your work! – Aaron

I like saying nice stuff to other classes – Ryan

The blog is very interesting and inspiring. It gives you Maths games to try out at home – Luke

I like the fact that it lets other people know about us and we can show people all that we’ve accomplished. – Leon

My favourite thing on the blog is Tommy’s Lego Video! – Dylan

As you can see from the selection we asked today, the students are largely very positive about blogging! What the students like about blogging sits very closely with the benefits of blogging that we’ve noticed. These include:

  • Blogging gives a parents an insight into the day-to-day life of the school – many of our parents have commented that it’s a lovely way to keep track of what your child is learning in school, particularly through photos, videos and podcasts.
  • Blogging encourages positive interactions between our older and younger students. – the senior classes in the school are excellent for praising the work of the youngest students in the comments sections.
  • Blogging encourages our students to take pride in their great work and to enjoy the praise and compliments from staff, students and parents that posting their work brings.
  • Blogging provides a focus on writing for purpose – the students enjoy writing blog posts and work really hard on their writing and editing.
  • Blogging promotes sharing resources and ideas with other schools – we’ve really enjoyed our interactions with other schools and classes and, while we’ve learned a lot from them, we also believe that they’ve picked up ideas from us!
  • Blogging develops school spirit – it really shines through how much our students love their school!
  • Blogging showcases hidden talents – Tommy’s video here is a perfect example of that.
  • Blogging is a lovely way to keep in touch with family and friends in other countries – we know we have grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers and sisters reading the blog to find out how school is going. Remember you can read the blog in any language, using the ‘Translate’ option at the side of the page.
  • Blogging gives us a platform to suggest ways to help your child’s learning – we provide links and suggestions, particularly through ‘Wednesday for Parents’, to strengthen the home-school links.
  • Blogging is a good way to develop safe, appropriate behaviour online. We have a strong emphasis on web safety and we model positive posting and commenting.

Today is a day to celebrate how far we’ve come in a year. We can’t wait to see what next year brings!

As always, you can read all previous ‘Wednesday for Parents’ posts here.

13 Feb

Even though the weather today was AWFUL, 5th class still managed to cover activities in the Outdoor and Adventure Activities strand of the PE curriculum… Although we didn’t quite brave outdoors!

The PE curriculum covers six strands:

  • Dance
  • Games
  • Gymnastics
  • Athletics
  • Aquatics
  • Outdoor and Adventure Activities

Every week, Paddy organises athletics with each class. Today, he set up a teamwork challenge for us. You can watch our video here. We had to try to get from one end of the hall to the other, using two mats, without touching the floor. Our follow-up activity was a maze of cones and we had to get across without touching the ground or the cones! You can see how much fun we had in our video!

Teamwork in PE! from St Peter’s, Bray on Vimeo.

 

13 Feb

2nd Class have finished Alfie Green and they really enjoyed it! It was lovely to read such a fun, adventurous book that was written by an Irish author!

Have a listen to our podcast and hear what we thought of it!

alfie green

12 Feb
On Monday we had a wonderful treat in Ms. Mitchell’s class because almost all of the class put in an extra super effort to our tests on Friday and had some truly impressive results! Ms. Mitchell was so proud that we even had TWO pupils of the week instead of one!
As a reward we made fruit smoothies in class and got to watch footage of the Winter Olympics while drinking them.
We chopped up the fruit, added yoghurt and orange juice and blended carefully, with the help of the wonderful Ms. Flanagan.
We think they tasted YUM!

12 Feb
This month our theme is “The Body”. We are exploring all of the different senses that the body has. This week we investigated the senses of sight and hearing.
We predicted what we might see and hear around the school corridors. Next we took a “sensory walk” around our school , first with our eyes closed so that we could focus on everything we could hear! Afterwards we walked around with our ears covered so that we could just focus on everything we would see!
We had a lot of fun! We found out that our school is a noisy, busy and colourful place!
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12 Feb

This week our blog turns 1 year old. We have achieved a lot in a short amount of time. One of the nicest things that has come from us blogging is that we now have students commenting on the blog every day, at home and in school. We also see our parents, families and the community checking out what we are getting up to and they leave us lovely comments too!

We were so excited and looking forward to reaching the 1,000th comment on the blog. This great moment happened last night when Aaron Gray in 5th Class commented on the Winter Olympics post. Well done to Aaron, and congratulations to everyone who has made such an effort to comment on the blog and get involved in supporting other classes and school spirit.

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12 Feb

After a long, busy month we’re back on the blog!

In January we did our Write a Book stories. First we had to think about what kind of subject we would choose to write about. Then we made a plan about it. We planned our five chapters. Then Mr. Foley checked our plans and then we started to write our stories into our copies. After the first and second chapter we read it out to the class. We typed all of our chapters on the computers, we saved them on to a USB memory stick and then we printed them. Ms. Flanagan bound them for us like a real book. We drew the pictures and the front cover for them.

They have been sent away to be judged. We got another school’s stories to read. Some were typed and some were handwritten. Some of their books had great handwriting. Their titles and covers were very interesting and were based on their story. We got to read some of them when they arrived last Friday. We thought they were all very interesting.

Two weeks ago we also started swimming. On Friday we are getting pizza to raise money for a charity trip to Kenya. We also finished our novel “The Butterfly Lion” by Michael Morpurgo and we are now reading “Danny, the Champion of the World” for Roald Dahl month.

We also researched our dangerous animals for our project. One group learned about lions. Another group learned about komodo dragons. Another group learned about snakes. Another group learned about spiders and the fifth group learned about scorpions. We’ve been very busy in class!

Make sure you check our other blog posts and don’t forget to watch Tommy’s cool lego video. We are looking forward to putting our next post up after the mid-term break.

By Luke, Stephen, Dylan W, Abhishek, Tommy, Jack J, Alan, Alex, Jordan, Jack B, Dylan M, Mason and Ryan.