St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

At the moment, many of the classes are working on place value in Maths. Place value is an important topic because it leads into addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. If your child is having difficulty with the topic or would like a bit more practice, here are some excellent sites with activities to try out. Most of these activities are more suitable for the senior classes.

1. Ordering numbers -putting numbers in order from smallest to biggest

2. Notation boards – How many thousands, tens and units in a number?

3. Place value game – Up to 100 thousand

4. Words as numbers – writing words as numbers – they say ‘ones’ instead of ‘units’ – e.g. five ‘ones’ instead five ‘units’

5. Make the biggest number – a very good game – a bit more challenging!

6. Making numbers with blocks – this is a really good game – you have options to just use units, to use tens and units or to use hundreds, tens and units.

7. Mental maths questions – This is an excellent site in general – these are similar questions to the ones you might find in your New Wave

8. Place value to thousands – matching words to numbers

9. Place value pirates – place value game – involves decimals to hundredths

10. Shark numbers – matching block values to numbers

And finally, looking for something to REALLY challenge yourself?  Quia gives you two player options so you can play against a friend.

Try them out and let us know! Which is your favourite?

We are in 2nd Class and this is our very first blog post on our own! We are so excited to tell you all about the great things we did to celebrate Roald Dahl Day today. Roald Dahl is one of the best children’s writers and we love his stories. We have Roald Dahl day on September 13th as that was his birthday. We remembered our favourite people and places in his books. These are some of the things we did.

1. We had a joke competition because Ms. Brennan told us that one of Roald Dahl’s famous lines is that ‘A little nonsense now and then is cherished by the wisest men!’. This means that even if you are very old and clever that it is important to laugh. Jamie won the competition and we had a laugh-o-meter! His joke was ‘Why didn’t the skeleton go to the disco? Because he had no-body to go with!’. He won a special Roald Dahl bookmark.

2. We made dream jars to look like the dreams the BFG makes for children. We brought in jars and used food colouring and other things in the art press to make pretty things float in the jar. Don’t they look nice?

3. Ms. Brennan has been reading Danny, the Champion of the World to us since we started school. We love the story of Danny and his Dad. We give this book 10/10.

4. We made LICKABLE WALLPAPER! This was great fun. We made it to remind us of the part in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory where the children get to lick the walls in the factory! It was so fun.

5. We decided to write some sentence backwards because he did it too. Esio Trot is a story by Roald Dahl and he has lots of parts of it backwards. It was great fun. Can you understand what Caitlin’s message says?

6. Finally we wore some yellow ribbon because yellow was Roald’s favourite colour. Everyone was stopping us and asking us why we were wearing yellow. We had to explain why and everyone knew then why we were wearing yellow, to remember Roald Dahl.

We hope you like our post. We worked hard today. Do you have a favourite Roald Dahl book? Why not let us know which is your favourite in the comments box? See you soon!

Fifth class continued their cooking adventures with a visit to France – or at least, we cooked French toast!

As we’re studying Europe this month, we’ve been trying out recipes that have European connections. This week, with the help of Paddy, we made French toast from the Keelings recipe found here. Because there were 18 of us cooking, we split into three teams.

One group made the egg mixture, testing out their newfound egg-cracking skills.

Another prepared the bread, the rashers and the bananas. The third group dipped the bread into the egg mixture and fried it. We served the French toast with a choice of rashers, bananas (or both!) and maple syrup!

Anyone who stayed still for too long was given the job of washing up and thanks to Paddy, all the clean up was finished by 2.30! The boys did a superb job, with very little help. Ms Sexton was extremely impressed that the first thing the boys did when they walked into the kitchen was wash their hands! They also remembered all the tips from last week about keeping safe in the kitchen.

Last week’s recipe was a great success – Davy, Sam, Alan and Luke baked our Swedish Gooey Chocolate Cake during the week!

Hopefully the families of fifth class will be enjoying French toast over the weekend! Any suggestions for our next recipe?

Congratulations to our new Student Council (2013-2014) pictured here today during their first meeting. The members of the Council are Codie Sweeney Kearney and Kelsey O’Callaghan (2nd Class), Kian Farrell and Finn O’Neill (3rd Class), Stephen Mooney and Jack Jin (4th Class), Leon O’Donoghue (5th Class) and Jamie Doonan (6th Class). Sam Smyth (5th Class) will be this year’s Chairperson and Ian Lawless (6th Class) will act as Secretary.

As they gathered for their first meeting, the SC recorded a very short podcast to introduce themselves, talk about life in school and also reflect on the new changes to our school.

Please have a listen below to hear what they have to say!

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/109878655″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

Every year, Culture Night takes place in late September. This year, it’s on the 20th of September – a Friday. It’s an amazing night where you can access venues and events around the country for free. Although all events are free, some may need to be booked in advance – which is why we’re drawing attention to them nice and early!

(more…)

Fifth class baked up a storm today, filling the school with the delicious smell of chocolate cake! Our theme for the month of September is Europe, so we began our studies into European food with a Swedish chocolate cake, based on the traditional kladdkaka. The recipe below can be served with whipped cream and blueberries, but we just ate it straight from the oven!

(more…)

Thanks to our friends in the Bray People for including a lovely piece about our school in today’s paper. The piece is on page two, and they have put in a picture of the staff and students on the first day of school last week, as well as a lovely picture of our new girls skipping to school on page four of the ‘First Day At School’ supplement.

Make sure to pick up a copy today!

Fifth class have taken their first steps into the exciting world of Scratch! Although one or two members of the class had already tried it out, most are working with it for the first time – and enjoying every minute!

Scratch is a free programme that introduces students to software development – it can be accessed here. Some of the students have already downloaded the programme to use at home, but  it can also be accessed online without having to download it, if you set up a Scratch account. Fifth class are going to set up a class Scratch account to make sharing and accessing each other’s projects easier! One of our past pupils, who just started first year and came back to visit today, wanted to join in and recreate his famous dragon programme from last year!

The best way to learn to use Scratch is free play with the programme, but we have been learning specific skills – such as how to make the sprites/characters move. Today, we made an aquarium using backdrops and two moving sprites!

Keep an eye out here for updates – we hope to upload some of our projects to this post later in the week…