St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

2nd Class are trying to get very good at using different fabrics and fibres in our Art lessons. We are working on how we can use wool and thread, and how wool is used for knitting and weaving. We practiced cutting, weaving and using wool when we made wool pencil-holder cups in class on Friday. It was so easy to do and it looks great. We also used it to help our maths, as we were making different shapes depending on the number of lines we cut. Have a look to see what we did!

Third class  have created wonderful self-portraits. We used mirrors to study the different shapes of our faces. We discovered that no one had a perfectly round head (like a football!) but instead everyone had different shapes. We also observed the different sizes and shapes of our noses, eyes, mouths, cheeks etc. It created quite a challenge for visitors to our room to see if they could recognise each face!  This activity showed us that each of us different and special in our own way.  We also came to the conclusion that being unique is what helps make the world an interesting place to live. Looking at the pictures Ms Byrne joked that she might need to work on some of our self-images!!!

We love reading comments on the blog! Our students are always excellent for leaving comments but over the last few weeks, there have been some fantastic ones as our students become more confident and comfortable. We love reading comments between classes praising each other’s work, especially when it’s some of the older students encouraging our younger classes.

One thing that we always say about Peter’s boys and girls is that they have plenty of school spirit – we hope that shines through in some of the comments from this week!

• This comment from Jack in 4th class on our Roots of Empathy post is a great example of an older child showing an interest in the work of a younger class:

• This comment was one of many from Caoilynn from 2nd class this week. She is really positive about all the activities in school, in real life and in her comments.

• This comment from Luke in 6th gives a real insight into how the students feel about making the podcasts:

• Also on that post, we got a great reaction from another school down in Cork. We commented on their posts last week and recommended it to others here. It’s lovely to get encouragement from another school – thanks Mrs Boyce’s class!

• Finally, on the same post, Jack, from 5th, who has been excellent at leaving comments lately, told us what he had experienced:

• This week, Adam, who wrote our very first post on the blog, got in touch. Adam is a past pupil who now lives on the far side of the Atlantic. We’re delighted that he used the blog to get in touch:

• School spirit? Patryk from 6th has it in spades! Check out his motivating comment about our Spelling Bee! Special mention to Luke also!

• This comment gets a special mention because Kelsey and Nathan from 2nd wrote it together about the birds they made. We love to see our students working together!

• On the same post, this was a great comment from Andy in 5th class. He made it very entertaining for 2nd class:

• Finally, our star commenter of the week has to be Luke from 5th class who had a kind word for everyone. We chose this comment as an example of how encouraging he is, especially to the younger classes. Well done Luke!

After studying the Ancient Egyptian people, third class discovered that people in Ancient Egypt did not use letters and words like we do today. Instead they used pictures known as hieroglyphs. A sentence was made by drawing a number of hieroglyphs in a row. Children wrote on papyrus using pens made from reeds. While we didn’t use papyrus and reeds in class we did attempt to write out the alphabet in hieroglyphs.  We enjoyed it so much we decided to write our names in hieroglyphs to match our self-portraits. Try it out using our codes below and see what your name would have looked like in Egyptians times! Also check out the cool pyramid made by Cathal, Adam and James using Jenga blocks. Well done boys!

A week full of Roots of Empathy, Write a Book and podcasts for you this week! Let’s get started:

• Sixth class recorded an excerpt of the ‘I have a dream’ speech for Martin Luther King day. You can listen to it here.
• 4th class posted some astounding facts on Twitter this week about dangerous creatures. The Mermaid Theatre were very impressed:

@StPetersBray we are a bit scared of all your spidery facts! Eeek! 🙂

— Mermaid Arts Centre (@mermaidarts) January 21, 2014

• 2nd class had Roots of Empathy with Baby T this week. You can watch the Animoto of his visit here.
• Fifth class worked with a very cool website this week to learn more about maps – you can read all about it here.
• The Student Council continues their great work – listen to their latest podcast here. (more…)

Earlier this year, we studied Van Gogh and we collaborated to recreate some of his most famous works. Van Gogh was born in 1853 in The Netherlands. He was famous for using bold colours.

First, we used pastels to each make a sunflower. Van Gogh painted the two paintings in his Sunflower series in the 1880s. We looked at the colours he used and then made our own sunflower. Two of the boys made a vase for our sunflowers. 

Next, we looked at The Starry Night. The Starry Night was painted by Van Gogh in 1889. It is made up of lots of different blues and greys. Ms Sexton found a picture of The Starry Night online and sketched the main features very lightly with pencil (using our whiteboard as a projector)! We divided up the picture into 18 pieces and then took a piece each. It was really difficult to work collaboratively because we were all using different hues of blues. We had to keep checking with each other, but even then, it was really difficult to match colours. If we were doing it again, we’d start with one piece from the centre and gradually work out to the edges. It was good fun though and we liked the end result.

This month, we’ve been working on Mondrian. We’ll post his display when we’ve all finished.

Who’s your favourite artist?

We had a lovely time on Wednesday when Baby Tristan came to visit our class for the second time. This visit’s theme for Roots of Empathy was all about Crying. We didn’t learn about Tristan’s crying because he is such a good baby and just never cries.

When the baby comes we do special things.

1. We sing our welcome song and a goodbye song

2. We weigh him and measure him

3. We play with the baby and have tummy time with him

4. We ask questions to his Mammy Gwen

5. We always come close to the baby to see if the baby notices us and work on our communication.

We love Roots of Empathy. Look at our video to learn more about how we got on yesterday.

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St Peter’s is delighted to announce that our first annual Spelling Bee will take place on Friday, January 31st!

We received our pack of rules, word lists and a dictionary from Easons this week. The Spelling Bee is a national contest, organised by Easons and Tubridy on 2fm. You can read more about it here.

5th and 6th classes will take part in the school competition and then one winner will go forward to represent the school at the county final.

Wondering how to prepare for the Spelling Bee? We suggest that you read as much as possible because the more words you come across, the easier you’ll find the list of words. If you’d like a list of words for a trial run, look back over this post. We put certain words in bold to suggest them for practise! Have you any suggestions for tricky words to watch out for?

image source

5th class have been focusing on maps and transport this month. Some of our activities so far have been:

• researching different types of transport
• studying maps of the London Underground
• reading and responding to transport themed poetry
• writing about our dream journeys
• working on our transport project

We’ve also discussed where our dream travel destinations would be and we’ve been working with Google Maps to explore the world. We found this really cool website that lets you make up a worldwide treasure hunt and we made up clues about where we’d like to visit. Here’s a class one that we worked on together. Unfortunately, we couldn’t embed it, but you should click on the link and then make your own one – it’s great fun!