St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

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 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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

We got a very important and exciting delivery in the post yesterday! Just as were getting settled back into class after mass, Karen came in with a letter from the postman that was addressed to Polly! Our Polly the Polar Bear! We just couldn’t believe it.

The card looked like this:

The envelope that the card arrived in

What the card looked like on the inside!

We just couldn’t believe it. Bridget, the Biodiversity Bee from St. Brigid’s in Greystones had invited our Polly to come and visit the children there! Polly was so excited!

We are going to prepare Polly for her trip to Greystones. We’ll miss her, but we know that our friends (who blogged about Brigid here) will take excellent care of her.

Here is a little video from us to Brigid and the children in her class!

IMG 7796 from St Peter’s, Bray on Vimeo.

Here in St Peter’s, we’re very conscious of Internet Safety. While it’s important to have general rules to prevent cyberbullying and to protect ourselves online, it’s even more important to develop skills and attitudes to help us to respond to any situation.

On the blog, we’ve covered Internet Safety for ‘Wednesday for Parents’ twice:

• This post suggested a number of sites to help parents and children learn about web safety.
• This post was the first ‘Wednesday for Parents’ of 2014 and suggested Digital Resolutions to improve Internet Safety for families.

Both posts are full of resources and well worth a look!

Today, to mark Safer Internet Day, some of the younger classes watched videos to teach us about Internet Safety. Older classes watched the coverage of Safer Internet Day on news2day here.

We also explored Webwise, particularly this interactive activity to help us learn about internet safety.

Finally, we were lucky to be given these bands by Simon Grehan for our classes:

How are you celebrating Safer Internet Day? Let us know in the comments!

We love to swim in St. Peter’s. We are safe and careful swimmers. We are learning all about water safety and how to swim well.

This year 2nd, 3rd and 4th Class go swimming in the Shoreline every Monday. Codie and Dylan recorded this podcast to tell you all about our swimming lessons!