St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

Why not listen to the Christmas poems that 2nd Class have learned?

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It’s the most wonderful time of the year… But what about when it’s actually the most difficult time of the year?

This week’s ‘Wednesday for Parents’ deals with the difficult topic of how to cope with Christmas when you’re bereaved and grieving – particularly how to access resources to help children to cope at Christmas time after the death of a loved one. Above anything else, I want to emphasise that this post is only intended as a list of resources – everyone grieves in different ways and what works for one person, mightn’t work for another.

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On Friday, Ms Kane finished her placement with 5th class in St Peter’s. The theme for her five weeks was ‘South America’ and 5th class are now experts on all things South America! We were really lucky to have Ms Kane as a teacher and the boys commented this morning on how strange it was not to have her in the classroom. Her lessons were always interesting and creative and she had a great rapport with the boys.  Here are some of our favourite things that we covered during Ms Kane’s placement:

• I loved making the tribal masks – Aaron J
• I liked learning about the Voladores, who jump off high poles and spin around like birds – Ameesh
• My favourite thing was practising sprints in PE – LukeMc
• I liked learning about Hernando Cortés – Ben
• I liked learning about all the games that people played years ago – LukeO’B
• I loved learning about forces and how they used it to move the statues – AaronG
• I loved watching the David Attenborough video of the rainforest – Andy
• I liked learning about all the animals that the animals made in Music – Jack
• I loved watching the video of tlachtli, the ball game, and I loved learning about Brazil and the rainforests in the Amazon – Johnny
• I loved learning about the Aztecs and the Incas – Ryan
• My favourite lesson was making the Olympic stadium in Art – Robert
• I loved all the artwork that we did with Ms Kane and the Drama lesson, especially the press conference – Adam
• My favourite part was learning about the different types of Music – like salsa and traditional – Leon
• I loved the Science lesson on reaction times – Davy
• I loved learning about the Easter Island statues – Andrei

We hope to see her very soon – she’s promised to keep in touch!

Thanks a million, Ms Kane!

P.S. have you heard? St Peter’s has been nominated for an EduBlog award – read all about it and vote here!

Many of you know that 2nd Class are once again taking part in Roots of Emapthy this year. You can see our video about Tristan’s first visit here.

But what is it all about? Why not hear 2nd Class explain how Roots of Empathy works in their latest podcast?

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P.S. have you heard? St Peter’s has been nominated for an EduBlog award – read all about it and vote here!

We’re absolutely delighted to say that our blog (specifically our work on our podcasts) has been selected as a a finalist in the international EduBlogs Awards. You can find the link to the list of finalists here.

The Edublog Awards reward people who contribute to life online with their education posts, tweets and podcasts. Last year one of our favourite Irish sites won it outright!

We would really love it if you would vote for us. We are against some incredible podcasts and sites and it would be a fabulous achievement to get to the final voting selection.

Voting is open until 11:59pm EST on Wednesday, December 18th. All votes are compiled using the List.ly website. You must login with or create a Listly account to vote and you can only vote once in each category.

To vote please do the following:

1. Click on the ^ underneath the box at the top of this post.

2. When you attempt to vote, you will just be asked to sign in to List.ly using your Facebook or Twitter account. Please log into your Twitter or Facebook account here and you can then register your vote!

PLEASE GET VOTING! Thanks for all of your support!

Big news this week on the blog! Our first post of this week and our most recent deal with the same exciting story… And that’s before we discuss the Mini-Scientist Showcase and Hallelujah Choir Concert! We’d better get started…

The headlines from this week are:

• Last Sunday, we posted our nominations for the EduBlog awards and we were delighted to receive nominations from ‘If only the best birds sang’, anseo.net and Seomra Ranga. We were delighted to find out on Friday that we’ve been shortlisted for the voting stages for the awards. We’d be extremely grateful for your support, you can find the information on voting here.
• This week saw the Mini-Scientist showcase! After all our hard work, 4th, 5th and 6th classes were delighted to show off all of the fantastic Science Fair projects on Wednesday. Congratulations to all the participants, to the runner-up group of Tommy, DylanM and Mason from 4th class and to the winning group of Sam, LukeO’B, AaronG and Davy, who go forward to the Regional Finals. You can read our first post about the showcase here. (more…)

Over the past few weeks, St Peter’s has been a hive of activity preparing for our Mini-Scientist Showcase. You can see all of our previous posts about preparing for it here! We were delighted to welcome two judges from Intel to the school – Sarah and Emily. We’ve had plenty of interaction with them over the past few months, by email and on Twitter so it was lovely to put faces to names! All of the staff remarked on how much time and attention that the judges gave to each project. It was an amazing opportunity for the students to present their work and to answer questions about their experiments. Sarah and Emily were really impressed with how much effort all the students put in and with their interest in Science!

Congratulations to all the students who were rewarded for their great work with fantastic prize bags from Intel. The judges found it difficult to choose winners but finally chose a 2nd place group and a 1st place! The 2nd place prize went to Dylan Mason, Mason Kelly and Tommy Lang from 4th class for their project on what colours birds were attracted to. The judges praised how well they discussed their project and their original idea. The winners on the day were from 5th class – Sam Smith, Luke O’Brien, Davy Berry-O’Connell and Aaron Grey for their project on game controllers. They used combinations of Electric Paint, MakeyMakey, Scratch and Lego to test the best controllers for a PacMan game. We will be showcasing projects over the next few weeks on the blog but for the moment, check out our Animoto of photos from the day.

Best of luck to Sam, Luke, Davy and Aaron, who take their project to the Regional Final on Monday December 16th!

P.S. have you heard? St Peter’s has been nominated for an EduBlog award – read all about it and vote here!

On Thursday night, Singing Club showed off all their hard work from the first term at the Hallelujah Choir Concert in CityWest Hotel. 24 boys and girls travelled on a bus for an afternoon of rehearsals and practice. The concert kicked off at 8pm and we were delighted to see plenty of familiar faces in the audience! The St Peter’s group were the life and soul of the party – even starting dance moves in the crowd. Special guests at the concert included Seo Linn, who during the Summer teamed up with Lurgan for their take on ‘Wake Me Up’, Connie Talbot and Tabby Callaghan. We had a fantastic evening with Paddy, Ms Sexton, Mr Foley and Ms Whyte. Thanks very much to Paddy for all his hard work organising the trip and to Ms Sexton and Mr Foley for helping with rehearsals on Thursdays, and of course to the boys and girls who were a credit to the school! We were very proud to unroll the super-banner and declare ourselves St Peter’s boys and girls!

P.S. have you heard? St Peter’s has been nominated for an EduBlog award – read all about it and vote here!

On Thursday, we’d a visit from Hugh and Ian from Wicklow Mountain National Park. Each class got to choose a topic to learn about. 5th class chose to learn about Irish mammals. We learned a lot and we got to hold stuffed animals and skulls. We also listened to recordings of wildlife sounds. We really enjoyed the visit and put together a podcast of facts about Irish mammals. Andy interviewed the class for this podcast. Thanks to Hugh and Ian for such an interesting talk!

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2nd Class were delighted to welcome Baby Tristan on his first visit to St Peter’s. He was a brilliant teacher and we learned so much. We are looking forward to the next few months getting to know our great teacher. Thanks Tristan and Gwen!