St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

First week back after midterm and after what we packed into this week, it feels like we’ve been back for weeks!

Here are the week’s headlines:

• A popular addition to this week’s blog was a look back over the first half term in numbers. Read all about it here!
• Our student council have lots of big plans on this week’s podcast!
• 2nd class podcasted about what they’ve learned in Geography recently here
• The Mini-Scientist work is starting to take shape – read our tips for researching your topic here
• Speaking of the Mini-Scientist project, 4th class blogged about their preparation so far here
• Ms Kane is helping to teach 5th class at the moment. Read all about what they learned about South America this week here
• ‘Wednesday for Parents’ dealt with the issue of web safety this week
• Take a look at 2nd class’s dancing skills in their Animoto video here
• The ‘Wednesday for Parents‘ post over the midterm was about Halloween online!
• Ms Hyland’s class were cooking – check out photos here
• International Tongue Twister Day was on Thursday. We used Twitter to share our lesson, we got great suggestions for tongue twisters from Alex and Caoilynn’s mam and we swapped tongue twisters with St Patrick’s NS in Glencullen! We also made a podcast of tongue twisters here!

 

In other news: (more…)

This week, Ms Kane has been visiting 5th class. The theme we’re following  in 5th class in November is ‘South America’.

Oisín interviewed the rest of the class about what they’ve learned so far this week.

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• We talked about the statues on Easter Island and watched this video about how the statues might have been moved on the island.
• We used what we know about forces to draw our own conclusions about the Easter Island statues.
• We learned about cities in South America and we summarised the information.
• We learned about the Incas and the Aztecs and all about the tribes.
• We listened to Irish music and South American music and we compared the two. Here’s Davy’s work on responding to the music:

• We learned all about Pope Francis, who comes from South America, and why he chose his name.
• We also created artwork using paint, using South America as an inspiration.
• In Drama we created freeze frames about trekking in the Amazon jungle.
• For International Tongue Twister day, we made up our own tongue twisters with a South American theme, you can listen to them on the podcast.
• We interacted with other schools and with parents on Twitter and shared our tongue twisters:

Ms Kane will be with us for another 4 weeks, so we will be sharing more of what we’ve learned about South America next week! Where would you like to visit in South America?

We had a brilliant day today trying out different funny thing for Tongue Twister Day! Have a listen to hear our Tongue Twisters!

– Ryan, Caoilynn, Kayden, Kelsey, Dean T

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This week, our ‘Wednesday for Parents’ post deals with an issue that worries many parents out there – Internet safety. Sometimes talking about technology with children can be like trying to speak a language that the adult is only learning and that the kids are already fluent in! It can be difficult to talk about keeping themselves safe online, when they seem to be the experts.

The resources we’ve picked out this week will help you to open the discussion about what your child knows about keeping him/herself safe online!

First, a website! Webwise is a fantastic resource. There’s an excellent parents section – with plenty of advice on how to keep your family safe online. This parental guide is particularly useful if you have any specific questions about web safety. Also good for answering any questions you might have about social networking, such as Snapchat and Ask.fm. Also useful for handy tips, such as how to toddlerproof your tablet and how to prevent in-app purchases .

Also worth a mention is Scoilnet.ie. They have a list of resources related to web safety – some for children, some for parents, some for teachers.

Finally, we really recommend NetSmartzKids. It has a variety of videos, with great graphics, that are up-to-date and relate to real problems and issues that kids face online. We’ve picked out a few videos to show you how they can be used, but you can check them all out here.

This one can be used with younger children to discuss telling someone if they see something online that upsets them or makes them uncomfortable:

This one can be used to discuss what your child or teenager puts on their social networking profile and how it could impact them in the future:

 

We’ll focus on these videos in more depth over the next few weeks in posts aimed at students as well as parents, but we really think that they’re worth taking a look at. We’d love to hear any other suggestions you have regarding online safety. Let us know in the comments!

2nd Class have been learning about maps, planet earth, the Arctic, Italy and Australia so far this year. We love exploring on the globe, on our computers, in our atlases and in our books. Today we loved back on all we know about Australia and Italy. Maybe you might learn something from us. Have a listen to see!

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Hello bloggers, we hope you are enjoying the blog. We are doing Science Projects at the moment, and so are Fifth and Sixth Class. For this, we got into groups of three and four. We were given time to decide both our groups and our projects. Mr. Foley was impressed how quickly and quietly we did this.

We have five groups in the class. After we were in our groups we were discussing what sort of Science Project we should do. All of us have different kinds of projects. Each group agreed on what we are doing. We have five different experiments, including dinosaurs, spiders, space, birds and the ocean.

Over the next three weeks we are going to start our projects and have them finished for December 3rd to show everyone. A judge will be coming into our school to look at Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth class’ projects. We feel sorry for Second and Third because they can’t do it but they’ll take part in the next few years.

We hope we learn loads about our projects and we can tell our parents at home, and we hope we will have great fun. All of us hope our experiments go well.

By Jack J, Alex, Ryan, Carl, Alan, Dylan W, Luke, Abhishek, Tommy (our chief editor!), Jack B, Jordan, Stephen, Dylan M, Mason

On December 3rd, the Intel Mini-Scientist exhibition will take place in the school. 4th, 5th and 6th classes will take part in the exhibition, presenting group projects. One of our Wednesday for Parents posts a couple of weeks ago dealt with choosing a good project for science fairs. This week, we’re going to concentrate on researching your topic.

Over the next couple of weeks, we’re going to model how to do a science fair project, using a sample question. If you follow along with the timeline, you should get your project finished in plenty of time!

Take, for example, the questions ‘Does playing music to plants make them grow faster?’ First, consider what you already know about plants and about music. Then ask yourself questions about what you’d like to know about plants and music! Maybe it’s about previous experiments, maybe it’s related to different types of music, maybe it’s related to different types of plants. (more…)

Myspace Message GeneratorsWe are just 9 weeks into term and already we’ve been so busy with the many activities and projects that is typical of the St. Peter’s school year. Hold onto your hats as we recap on the term so far, in numbers!

1: The amazing Open Day we held on the 28th September!

2: The number of brand new after-school clubs, to go with the existing four!

3: The number of weeks we have been dancing with our Irish Dancing teacher Sue!

4: The number of songs we performed at our school Open Day!

5: The number of times our different classes have baked or cooked up a storm in the kitchen!

6: The number of girls in our brand new school!

7: The number of different new features we have added to our blog so far this year!

8: The number of ‘Wednesday for Parents’ posts we have shared on our blog.

9: The number of symbols we stuck on our Culture Night door to represent life in St. Peters!

10: The number of students on our brand new Student Council.

11: The number of people who created our biggest human piano on the Makey Makey board – we will try to increase that later in the term!

15: The number of Roald Dahl books in our school plan, which is why we celebrated Roald Dahl Day on the 13th of September!

16: The number of Food Dudes and Dudettes in 2nd Class who have been eating fruit and veg in school for the past three weeks!

25: The number of podcasts we have recorded so far!

30: The number of days left to the Intel Mini-Scientist Fair!

32: The number of participants in our local cross country championships!

48: The number of questions in our Maths Week Quiz.

81: The number of blog posts so far this school year!

135: The number of followers our brand new Twitter account has.

288: The number of comments so far on our blog this school year.

323: The number of tweets we have sent since we joined twitter in the first week in October!

€366.60 : The amount raised for the Wicklow Hospice when we held our Rainbow Day.

€989.70: The amount raised on our Halloween Dress-Up Day!

Infinite… the number of laughs, pages read, facts shared, equations solved, friends made and memories cherished. Here’s to more in 2013/14!

 

We are going to enter our blog in the Eircom Junior Spider Awards. We are going to enter the Mega Spider category for primary schools. Have you heard of the awards? The entry date is in December. Find out more about the awards here! Do you have any suggestions to improve our blog in the meanwhile? Let us know and leave a comment below!