Today we tried to use Storybird to help us with our Write-A-Book project. We challenged ourselves to use pictures to make up a story. We use Storybird to write stories. It is cool because the pictures are there for you. We try to put them together to make sense!
We wrote this story in just 5 minutes! Have a look!
2nd Class have had great fun in Music class recently. We have learned new songs, used actions to help us to tell the ‘music story’ of songs, listened to different pieces of music without words to ‘get-us-thinking’ and also we have picked up new ‘music words’. We decided to record two of our favourite songs from the past few weeks. We hope you like them.
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[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/129304139″ params=”color=ff6600&auto_play=false&show_artwork=true” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
Our project was called ‘Does one hand react quicker than the other?’ We tested our question using two tests – one was by putting your hand into a bowl of ice and seeing how long you could leave it there in seconds. The other test was the ruler test, where you let the ruler go and see how quickly you can catch it again.
We found that with the ice, your dominant hand can last much longer in the ice than your non-dominant hand. There wasn’t as much of a difference in the ruler test, which surprised us because we thought it would have a much greater difference.
When we were researching our project, we learned that it’s believed that people who are left-handed are more creative but there’s a lot more right-handed people than left.
Our favourite part of the project was the ruler experiment because Keane enjoyed it more than doing the ice experiment. We were nervous talking to the judge but it was ok once we got started.
Thanks for reading about our project,
Billy, Keane and Kevin
Brotherly love!
On Friday everybody in St. Peter’s had a chance to win a golden ticket to the B.T. Young Scientist and Primary Science Fair. Me [Eduard] and my brother Lester won the golden ticket from twitter to go. We got to bring our whole family! It was a great day. We decided to write your a blog post to tell you all about it.
We went to the entrance and into the Minerva suite to get our wristbands. It was so great! We got a book about the history of the building and project. We went to the Discover Primary Science school section first and we saw lots of good things. The first thing we saw was a robot fixing a messed up Rubik’s Cube in only 10 minutes! Next we saw animal skulls. The smallest was a Snow Leopard and the biggest was the Zebra. After that I wandered off and I found a camera that lets me zoom into lots of things. I saw tube worms and barnacles on an Oyster. There were anenames, seaweed and crabs. I was able to zoom into my skin and clothes! My baby brother’s leather jacket looked like my skin but it was black and blue.
Following that we saw a robot that was able to be controlled by an Xbox 1 controller. My baby brother came second in a maze get out with a time of 8 minutes and 37 seconds. The robots were able to push buttons by pressing the A button on the controller to open hidden gates. We learned that 3 insects indicate fresh water and that leaches, rat tailed maggots and red worms indicates dirty water. Also the cowboys searched for gold by getting lots of sand into a pan and they started spinning the pan so the sand will go and the minerals will stay behind. After that we saw the Secondary School projects. They were incredible and must have taken hours to prepare for. We would love to take part some time.
After all that we were so tired and we decided to go home. We all had a great day! Thanks to everyone at BTYSE for such a great day out!
There are many great days in St Peter’s every year. There are great days when we all feel as if we’ve worked together to achieve something special and great days when our fantastic students get to show off the results of all their hard work. Of all the great days in the school calendar, there’s a special one that stands out – we love our Christmas play! We had our first performance at 11.30 a.m. on the Thursday morning and our second at 7 p.m. and we had a ball from start to finish.
For those who aren’t familiar with our Christmas plays, we always start with class plays – a mixture of songs, dances, sketches:
Next, we moved on to the raffle, organised by the Parents’ Council. The Parents’ Council sourced all the fantastic prizes and we’d like to thank all the local businesses who kindly donated prizes. As always, the work that’s seen on the night is only the tip of the iceberg and the Parents’ Council were in working hard on Thursday morning, getting set up. Thanks a million for all your hard work this year! Special thanks also to Alan, Aaron’s dad, who looked after front of house at the main door.
Our main play is always a Roald Dahl version of a well-known fairytale. This year’s tale was ‘Cinderella’ and it was the usual mixture of mayhem and mischief. We have to give great credit to our fantastic cast, who worked so hard throughout. Archie, as Cinderella, won great praise for his singing and acting. Patryk, the Prince, played the ‘bad guy’ wonderfully. Keane and Leon, our Ugly Sisters, had the audience in stitches as the Ugly Sisters. Andrei, our lovely Jam Man, charmed everyone and we are so proud of how hard he worked to prepare for this role.
Every student was a star and we were so proud of all the children, as were the parents. We loved watching the eyes dart as they search for familiar faces in the crowd and then the smile when they find who they were looking for! Thanks a million to our fantastic audiences, who were so supportive. It was lovely to see friends of the school there too – Tommy, Conor and Mary from the SPU, Susan and Greta from Hollyoaks, Michelle from School Completion, Greg and Ms Kane! Thanks a million for coming along.
To finish off the night, we had a fantastic performance of ‘Merry Christmas Everyone’ which had everyone dancing and singing along. Lots of tired heads the following morning, but, as always, worth every minute of hard work that the students put in! Check out our video above to get a flavour of the day!
Has it only been 5 days since Monday??
After all the excitement of the Christmas play and the wonderful chaos of December, it’s been lovely to get back to a bit of routine this week. We’re delighted to have all our students back and that they were well-rested and happy to come back to school!
January is always a bit of an exciting month – people make new goals and resolutions and push themselves to do and be better! You can hear 2nd class talking about their New Year’s Resolutions on their podcast here! In 5th class, we’ve been looking at the top 100 Inspirational Quotes from Forbes. You can read them here. In groups, we read the quotes and picked out our favourite ones, discussing what we think they mean. We made a podcast below of our favourite ones. Well done to Sam for leading the podcast!
There are a couple of quotes in our classroom and corridor. Here’s the one over our classroom door.
This is one we had over Christmas…
What’s your favourite quote?
My project was called ‘Electrical Edibles’ and my question was ‘can you conduct electricity using fruit and vegetables?’
I found that I wasn’t able to power a lightbulb using fruit and vegetables during the actual project, but when I used a clock kit, I was able to. I found a picture of a Christmas tree powered by Brussels Sprouts. If my mum asked me why I wasn’t eating my Brussels Sprouts, I could say that I was saving them for something important.
Our title was ‘Rollercoaster on a poster’ and our question was ‘what effect does the surface have on how far a KNEX car travels?’
We found out that tinfoil was the smoothest surface so it helped the car to travel faster. We timed it by using a stopwatch. There was very little friction between the tinfoil and the KNEX wheel, so there was nothing to slow it down.
Our favourite part was Ameesh’s victory dance. We liked building our KNEX structure with Mr Kinsella. It was easy to explain our project to the judge and she gave us a good comment.
Thanks for reading about our project.
AaronJ, Ameesh, Andrei, LukeMc
Welcome to a brand new year of Wednesday for Parents!
It seems fitting to start the year with a post on resolutions – digital resolutions! I found this post over the holidays on ‘10 New Year’s Resolutions for Digital Families‘ on uknowkids.com and they’ve kindly agreed to allow me to share it here. Uknowkids.com has an excellent blog with fantastic resources for parents about safety online. The author of the post, Tim Woda, also has a number of excellent resources on his blog – which you can find here. These resolutions are practical, easy to implement and really good ideas – we thought they’d be perfect to share here.
1. Get to know what sites your child is using online, particularly social media. Webwise have an excellent parents’ section explaining all the major forms of social media. This guide is also an excellent source of information, which includes info on all the main sites and apps. It also goes into detail about how teenagers and children hide information online from parents, and how to manage this.
2. Talk about the rules. Uknowkids.com suggest rules related to the following:
3. Set up a contract related to online behaviour. Be clear in what you expect from your child and the consequences if they don’t stick to their contract.
4. Monitor your child’s use of the Internet. Ask questions and check the browsing history of your child’s computer, tablet or smartphone. There are a number of programmes and apps out there that will help you to track your child’s usage. A really important point that keeps coming up is that if your child is on the computer a lot and there are large stretches of nothing in the browser history, you should be aware that your child is probably clearing their history.
5. Limit digital access. Technology can be a powerful tool, but it can also be a distraction from what really matters. There’s no reason for your child to spend every waking second on her computer or smartphone, and doing so limits family time, opportunities to learn, and real social interaction. Consider turning off your wireless connection or setting in place an hour of family time each night.
6. Update privacy settings. Social media sites such as Facebook frequently change their default privacy settings, which means that previously private posts can suddenly become public. Take a few minutes to check your child’s privacy settings – as well as your own – and ensure they’re not accidentally sharing their entire lives with the whole world.
7. Back up your files. It’s not particularly fun, but backing up your files can save you lots of heartache. You can use a service such as Dropbox (which we use a lot ourselves in Peter’s) to keep access to your files, or can transfer your documents and photos to a small flash drive.
8. Become your child’s friend. If you’re not already friends with your child on social media sites, it’s time to change that. This is one of the easiest ways to monitor your child’s digital behaviour because you’ll receive updates when she posts a new status or photo. However, be aware that Facebook settings can be changed to block almost all content from specific users.
9. Change your passwords. Changing your passwords every few months helps keep your data secure from hackers and other threats. Take a few minutes to change all of your passwords, and tell your child to do the same.
10. Teach basic computer skills. It’s never too early to teach your child proper computer skills. Teach your child the basics in computers and programming. Our Hour of Code link was an extremely popular one – you can access it here. Also, there is no substitute for teaching your child why it’s so important to be safe online. You can access our previous post on web safety here.
Thanks again to uknowkids.com for giving permission to publish their resolutions and to adapt them. If there’s any particular part of today’s post that you’d like to know more about, please let us know and we’ll include it in future posts! We’d love to hear any of your tips for keeping the kids in your home safe online – let us know in the comments!
If you’d like to read about the work by this year’s Junior Infants, click here.
If you’d like to read about the work by this year’s Senior Infants, click here.
If you’d like to read about the work by this year’s 1st class, click here.
If you’d like to read about the work by this year’s 2nd class, click here.
If you’d like to read about the work by this year’s 3rd class, click here.
If you’d like to read about the work by this year’s 4th class, click here.
If you’d like to read about the work by this year’s 5th class, click here.
If you’d like to read about the work by this year’s 6th class, click here.
If you’d like to read about the work by Ms Kane’s class, click here.
We’d love to hear from you – please leave a comment on our posts!
We were the Scoilnet Star Site for December 2013!
