St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

Yesterday afternoon, the correct question was revealed. We knew that the answer was New York. After 54 guesses, Ryan in our class was the first and only pupil in the whole school to get it correct! The question was “Where are the Jets from?”. The clue we got on Monday was that Kayden in 2nd Class was wearing their football gear as a Halloween costume.

The next answer will be up on Monday. The question is, do YOU know the question….!

By Calvin, Abhishek, Jack B, Luke, Jack J, Stephen, Mason, Dylan M.

2nd Class were absolutely amazed yesterday when they got a very interesting tweet from an old St. Peter’s friend.  Why not hear all about the tweet and the visit that resulted afterwards? Meet our new friend Polly!

Polly lands in 2nd Class! from St Peter’s, Bray on Vimeo.

Congratulations to Leon from 5th class, who recently had a book review published by South Dublin Libraries! Leon is a superb reader, who always has one or two or seven books on the go. He’s also gifted with words and has an amazing vocabulary! We’re delighted to see him showcase his talents!

You can read Leon’s review here!

Leon reviewed John Boyne’s ‘Stay where you are and then leave’. The book was nominated for the Bord Gais Irish Book Awards in the ‘Senior Children’s Book of the Year’ category. You can read all about the Irish Book Awards here! Leon really enjoyed the book and had very interesting points in his review. It’s definitely worth a read! 5th class are also currently reading ‘The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’ by John Boyne.

South Dublin Library are just one of the many new contacts we’ve made on Twitter and we interact with them on a regular basis – which led to Leon’s review! Their website is here and has lots of information, not only about the library services but also about books for adults and children.

Special mention has to go to the fantastic @SummerBuzz account, linked to the library service. @SummerBuzz is always hugely supportive of children’s reading and often suggests interesting books to us, depending on what we’re sharing on Twitter. Maria O’Sullivan sent a very complimentary note to Leon, praising his work and encouraging him to write more reviews in the future! They’d also love to read reviews from other boys and girls in the school so, if you’re interested, let your teacher know.

We look forward to working with the library again soon! What are YOU reading at the moment?

photo source

The Student Council would like to thank Ms Whyte for their new badges. Now everyone will know who are our representatives in our classes. Our badges look great! Well done to the current reps for all of their hard work so far this year!

2FM and SuperValu are set to team up again with the St Vincent de Paul to help those who need it the most in our community this Christmas. The Toy Appeal has been a great success over the past 4 years. This year they have an even bigger goal and we want to help them to transform Christmas for thousands of families throughout the country.

This year, St Peter’s have decided to get involved. We want to ensure that no auntie or uncle, granny or grandfather struggling financially has to personally suffer to give some simple presents this Christmas.

There are several ways to get involved:

1. Buy a virtual gift in our online store and be in with a chance to win RTE TOY SHOW TICKETS
2. Buy a voucher in SuperValu to help families with their food costs at Christmas. You can simply buy the voucher at the till and drop it off in the secure box available in each store
3. Drop off an unwrapped toy at your local Supervalu store.
4. Buy a voucher at Eason or Toymaster.

Or if you’d like to pick a gift yourself, simply drop any new unwrapped toy into your local SuperValu or Superquinn. Collection points will be open from Monday 25th November.

What are we doing in St. Peter’s?

This year, we’re asking you to spend no more than €1 or €2 on simple, cheap toys that are similar to those you’d find in a stocking. We’ll collect them and send them to families in need this Christmas. This small gift from you could really help a family that is struggling financially this Christmas. Gifts can be dropped into the office and all donations of toys or gifts for children that are unopened and still packaged/boxed would be greatly appreciated!

For more follow 2fm on twitter @RTE2fm using the #2fmopsanta and like the 2fmoffical page on Facebook!

A quiet week on the blog this week, but certainly not a quiet week in St Peter’s. We’ve lots coming up in the next few weeks and this week was definitely a preparation week – lots of singing, science and sketches. That’s not to say that we don’t have plenty of news for you – if you missed anything during the week, you’ve come to the right place!

Here are the headlines from the week:

• The weeks started in the best possible way, with the return of everyone’s favourite chicken, Nugget. He mightn’t have been so excited to return if he was a turkey! 32 sleeps to the big day!
• Speaking of Christmas – 2nd and 3rd made lanterns this week for the turning on of the lights in Bray. Check out their beautiful work here!
• A couple of weeks ago, we showed you the excellent ‘Irish history in 6 minutes’ with Manny Man (aka John Ruddy). 5th class had the fantastic opportunity to interview him – you can check out the blog post here.
• Roots of Empathy returned this week. Last year, Roots of Empathy was a huge success – you can read all the posts on the blog about it here.
• Ms Brennan presented at the NALA Family Learning Conference this week – she spoke to other schools about using blogs and technology to engage parents and students. Ms Sexton helped out in the afternoon with the workshop. NALA also run a great website called ‘Help My Kid Learn’ – our ‘Wednesday for Parents’ post discusses it in more detail.
• One of our after school clubs this week, Scratch Club, used Blockly to learn how to problem-solve, using code. Read all about it here.

In other news:

(more…)

http://learn.code.org/hoc/1 – here’s the link!

One of our recent Scratch clubs with 2nd and 3rd classes focused on a tutorial, made for Computer Science Education Week (9th December – 15th December). It uses Blockly to introduce children to writing basic code. Blockly is quite similar to Scratch in many ways and the children adapted very quickly!

We noticed that this tutorial was great for the children’s problem-solving skills, as they tested their code regularly and fixed it when it went wrong. It starts off at a very easy level and gets more challenging as it goes. It’s a really enjoyable activity and it’s an ideal activity for your child to work on alone or with an adult!

Thanks to Mags Amond who showed us this link. We follow Mags on Twitter here! She always has great suggestions and links for ICT!

Try out the activity above and let us know how you got on!

This Wednesday, we’re going to focus on just one website – Help My Kid Learn!

Help My Kid Learn is a website by NALA (National Adult Literacy Agency) to help parents to develop their children’s learning at home. The activities are broken up into different age-groups. The activities fall under the categories of ‘Talk’, ‘Play’, ‘Read’, ‘Write’ and ‘Count’ and discusses how to approach the activity, why the activity is important and how to follow on from the activity. They also have suggestions for online activities and for smartphone apps that could help. There’s also an option on the website to sign up for monthly tips and ideas to help your child learn.

If you have concerns about your child in a particular area, although you are always welcome to talk to his/her class teacher or to Ms Sugrue or Mr Kinsella, this is an alternative support!

The website is based on the  ‘Literacy and Numeracy for Learning and Life’ (Department of Education and Skills 2011). This strategy tries to improve literacy and numeracy among young people, by linking schools, parents and communities to help children’s learning. You can read more about the strategy here.

Above everything else, the website emphasises that you know your child better than anyone else and that every child has different needs. What do you think? What activities work well with your child?

Hello bloggers, last week our class finished our third novel this year. It is called “Rover Saves Christmas” by Roddy Doyle. It is really funny. We did an interview about and recorded it as a podcast. We used soundcloud to record the podcast. We used the iPad to record our voices. We wrote questions in our English copy to see who had the best questions for the interview. Jack Barsoum interviewed the whole class (He did a great job! – Mr. Foley). Our voices seemed to sound different. This is because our voice vibrates through our skull so we don’t hear our voices like other people hear them.

Click on the podcast below to hear our class interview. Hope you enjoy our podcast!

By Jack J, Tommy, Dylan W, Alex, Dylan M, Calvin, Jack B, Abhishek, and Mason.

2nd Class are so excited. Today they started Roots of Empathy. We had a pre-family visit. Next week Baby T will visit us for the first time. Today we sat on our green mat and practiced how to behave at the mat. We talked about the things that we think baby will do next week. We guessed how big he will be. We also voted on a name for our baby doll who will help us to learn. The doll’s name is Fia. Finally, we learned a welcome and goodbye song for when Baby T comes to visit. We can’t wait for next week and will tell you all about it then.

This is Baby Fia

Hard at work on our mat

For parents:

In the Roots of Empathy program, a parent and baby (who is two to four months old at the start of the program) from the community visit a classroom nine times over the course of a school year. A trained Roots of Empathy instructor visits with the family to guide children as they observe the relationship between the baby and its parent. The instructor also visits before and after each family visit to reinforce teachings. There are 27 classroom visits in total in a Roots of Empathy program.

In the program, the baby is the “Teacher.” With each family visit, the instructor leads the children in noticing how the baby is growing and changing over the course of his or her first year of life. The children also watch the loving relationship between the parent and baby and see how the parent responds to the baby’s emotions and meets the baby’s needs. The attachment relationship between a baby and a parent is an ideal model of empathy.

Children learn to understand the perspective of the baby and label the baby’s feelings, and then are guided in extending this learning outwards so they have a better understanding of their own feelings and the feelings of others. This emotional literacy lays the foundation for more safe and caring classrooms, where children are “Changers.” They are more socially and emotionally competent and much more likely to challenge cruelty and injustice.