St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

You might be wondering why the snow is back on the blog… here in St. Peter’s we’ve decided to get behind our Winter Olympic Wonders, the wonderful people competing for Ireland in the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia! We live in the town of one of the greatest Irish Olympians, so it is just right that we are aware of  the talents of our Winter Olympic stars.

The Winter Olympics have lots of cool (excuse the pun!) sports that you may have never even heard about! You can find out about all of the sports here – now is the time to watch sports that you have only ever tried out on your wii!

Here are the details about the Irish competitors.

We have:

1. Jan Rossiter in Cross-Country Skiing.

2. Sean Greenwood in the Skeleton.

3. Conor Lyne in Alpine Skiing.

4. Florence Bell in Alpine Skiing.

5. Seamus O’Connor in Snowboarding.

Check out the highlights from the games every evening on RTE News Now, which you can also watch online.

‘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 need a clean, empty tin, ice, salt and water.
• This post tells you how to make your own thermometer. You’ll need an empty glass bottle, water, rubbing alcohol, food colouring, a clear straw, Plasticine and a marker.
• Why do we put salt on the paths when it’s icy? Find out with this experiment. You’ll need food colouring, different types of salt and ice.
• Make a tornado and rain clouds with this post. For the tornado, you’ll need 2 one-litre bottles, a metal washer that fits closely to the top of the bottle, duct tape and glitter. For the rain clouds, you’ll need shaving cream, a bottle, food colouring and a small container to drop water from.]
• This is a simpler version of the tornado experiment, using a jar, washing up liquid (dish soap) and water!
• This post tells you how to make a balloon barometer. You’ll need a scissors, a 12 inch balloon, a large mayonnaise jar, a wide rubber band, sellotape, a needle or a straight pin, a plastic straw, glue, cardboard and a pencil/pen.

There are lots of other experiments and activities out there that are worth checking out! Let us know how you get on with the experiments above and which ones you’d recommend, in the comments.

It’s cold out, isn’t it? 🙂

We have used StoryBird to show three more stories brought to life on our blog. Well done to Abbi, Billy and Jamie in 2nd Class!

2nd Class record their reading daily. We record ourselves and listen back to see if our reading has improved. We give each other pointers and help each other to improve. We like reading for an audience and practicing speaking loudly, clearly and with a nice tone.

We are taking First Steps to good reading. So far this year, we have read four books together. The Giraffe, The Pelly and Me, The Magic Finger, Esio Trot and Care of Henry. We have worked on:

1. Visualising – closing our eyes and seeing the story in our head.

2. Questioning – asking each other questions about the story, podcasting as we think back on our books etc.

3. Making Connections – connecting each book to another, connecting the story to me, connecting the story to my world!

Next we will work on Summarising. This is how we put all the parts of a story together and explain what has happened so far in a story, in our own words.

Do you want to hear how we use SoundCloud? Listen to us read a chapter of our current book, ‘Alfie Green and the Magical Gift’!

Roots of Empathy is going so well in 2nd Class. So far we have learned about:

1. Meeting the Baby

2. Crying

3. Getting teeth.

This is our latest podcast and we talked about getting teeth and teething. Have a listen to hear about what we learned!

Welcome to another edition of the St Peter’s Post. January seemed like a long month – full of activities and lots of work! Just a reminder that parent-teacher meetings take place next week – contact your child’s teacher if you haven’t received a time yet (it could be in the bottom of the schoolbag too!)

The main headlines this week are:

• We’ve all been busy working on our Write-A-Book projects. 2nd class published some of their stories using Storybird this week. You can read them here.
• 5th class recorded a podcast all about their progress. Listen to it here.
• 6th class were making their covers this week:

Designing a book cover for Write A Book in 6th class! pic.twitter.com/riOGwZP5n0

— St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) January 29, 2014

• 3rd class showed us all some of their fantastic displays this week. They’ve been learning all about the Egyptians.
• Our ‘Wednesday for Parents’ this week was all about drawing activities for home – might be particularly useful over the weekend when all the matches are called off because of the storm!
• 3rd class also made a brilliant display of the Trojan Horse. See it here.
• Ms Mitchell’s class made a poem about time this week. Read it here!
• Check out 3rd class’s excellent self-portraits here!
• 2nd class did some beautiful weaving last week. Check out their work here.
• We celebrated comments on the blog. Check out the feel-good factor here!
• It’s St. Brigid’s Day tomorrow – watch our vine showing you how to make St Brigid’s Crosses here.

In other news this week: (more…)

Check out our video on Vine! It shows how to make a St. Brigid’s Cross with pipe cleaners.

In history we studied the story of The Wooden Horse of Troy.  Each of us then designed our own wooden horse. Dylan, Kian, Chris and Finn drew pictures of King Menelaus, Achilles, Helen of Troy and Paris while TJ designed the map of Ancient Greece. We then used cocktail sticks and lollipop sticks to design our own wooden horse for our classroom. It took us a long time because of all the different angles on the horse but everyone agreed it was worth it when we displayed it on our history board in third class!

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 a great project for a rainy day and it comes out really well. Here’s the step-by-step explanation – sourced from here.

and this is how it turned out when Adam from last year’s 6th class tried it out: (more…)