St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

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!

The dates for celebration for our school sacraments in 2014 will be as follows.

1. First Confession – Tuesday, 20th of May.

2. First Communion – Sunday, 25th of May.

3. Confirmation – Saturday, 17th of May.

Did you know that there’s not just one type of engineering? Just like a doctor can specialise as a GP or a surgeon, the career of an engineer can be very specialised too!

Today, we learned about the different disciplines of engineering here on the Steps website.

We each chose a different area of engineering that we would be interested in. Well done to Alan for leading today’s podcast! What area of engineering would you be interested in?

Welcome to another edition of the St Peter’s Post. This week was full of Write-A-Book projects and parent-teacher meetings. We had fantastic attendance at our meetings this week and it was a fantastic opportunity to discuss the students’ progress. Write-A-Book was a great success and we were delighted to submit over 70 books for reading in other schools. Congratulations to all the boys and girls who took part!

This week’s headlines:

• We’ve new additions to the Project Room – two terrapins. Read Codie’s blog post on them here.

We are trying to think of names for them! They will live in the project room. We want to call them Esio and Trot! pic.twitter.com/NhHwfkSi9b

— St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) February 3, 2014

• Second class have continued to publish their Write-A-Book stories on the blog using Storybird. You can read them here, here and here.

• Last week, 5th and 6th class took part in the school round of the Easons Spelling Bee. Read the report from Ian from 6th class, our winner, here. Ian now goes forward to the Regional Final in a few weeks.

• Ever wonder how we use podcasting to help our reading? Read Ms Brennan’s explanation here.

• If you haven’t seen it yet, you have to check out Tommy’s AMAZING stop-motion animation. Tommy’s in 4th class and he’s extremely talented! Watch his film here.

• Wondering why the snow on the blog is back? It’s to mark the start of the Winter Olympics. Read all about it here.

• Roots of Empathy continues and you can listen to the latest podcast here. We were also delighted to welcome Joan Daly-Martin to the school this week. She left lovely comments on our Roots of Empathy posts. Thanks Joan!

• Wednesday for Parents dealt with the hot topic (or more appropriately, the cold, wet and windy topic) of the weather. Read some great suggestions for weather experiments that can be carried out at home here.

In other news this week:

• Swimming started this week and our 2nd, 3rd and 4th classes really enjoyed.

• Lots of important notes went home this week. One was the uniform questionnaire, another was related to our application to become a Digital School of Excellence and another was sharing exciting news about the future of the school. Let us know if they didn’t reach home and we can send you out a copy of any of them!

• This is what our Student Council got up to this week. You can find the link to the Blockly tutorials here.

Our Student Council are working using Blockly to improve our problem solving in programming! We’re working in teams. pic.twitter.com/iCbBTNkpNg

— St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) February 5, 2014

• We’ve been using News2day to improve our note-taking and knowledge about the world around us.

Next week sees St Peter’s celebrate a very special birthday! Keep an eye on the blog during the week to find out more.

As always, you can catch up with previous editions of the Peter’s Post here.

It is lovely when students let us know about some of the amazing and creative things that they like to do in their spare time at home.

We were absolutely delighted when Tommy Lang in 4th Class filled us in on the stop-motion animation videos that he like to make at home on his Nintendo 2DS.

We were all looking forward to the new Lego movie coming out – now we’re thinking that we don’t need to see it as we have Tommy’s brilliant movie that is just incredible to watch.

Well done Tommy, we’re so proud of you. Make sure you have a look and let him know what you think of his video in the comments section!

Tommy’s Stop Motion Lego Video from St Peter’s, Bray on Vimeo.

On Friday the 31st of January, 2014, 5th and 6th class took part in the first St Peter’s Spelling Bee. The competition involved getting a word from the easy list in the first round, the medium list in the second round and the hard list in the final round. Whenever we spelled one of our words wrong, we were out. We could get the word in a sentence to help us, and in the final round, we could also get the definition. The last two left standing was Jamie from 6th, and me. We were trying to win at the knockout stages for about 15 minutes. In the end, I won. I am going to the Regional Finals next!

By Ian Lawless, 6th class.

The Easons Spelling Bee is run with Tubridy on 2fm. You can read our information post here

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St. Peter’s has new turtles! They are called terrapins. We have named them Gordon and Douglas. We feed them prawns and they chase them in the water to catch them in their mouth. Gordon has a tail and Douglas doesn’t. They live in the Project Room. Thanks to Paddy for getting them. We’ll look after them well!