St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

From early morning, it became clear that Friday wasn’t an ordinary day in St Peter’s! Staff and students raided their wardrobes for their brightest clothing and took part in Rainbow Day – a very special non-uniform day in aid of Wicklow Hospice!

Each class had wonderful outfits and prizes were awarded – Abbi Douglas in 2nd class managed to wear every colour of the rainbow. 3rd class did a fantastic job of sticking to the theme – Ms Byrne had a tough job narrowing it down to just one, but TJ was the eventual winner. In 4th class, Abhishek was a worthy winner thanks to his fantastic jumper! 5th class was another tough  choice, but Luke O’Brien edged it because he risked frostbite with shorts and t-shirts for the day! 6th class had two winners, unsurprisingly awarded to the double act of Kyle and Sky – we hear rumours that they’ve already planned their Halloween costumes! The staff also got into the swing of things –  special mention should go to Ms Byrne, whose multicoloured boots were the source of great jealousy! Paddy wore green and red, convenient considering Sunday’s big game!

Apart from admiring the fantastic effort put into the outfits, we’re extremely grateful for all the donations we received today – we raised €366.60 for Wicklow Hospice, a huge achievement for a small school!

We presented the cheque to Billy Porter, who does a lot of fundraising work for Wicklow Hospice, and for many other charities and community groups. Billy is turning 50 next week and he’s having a party in Rathdrum in aid of Wicklow Hospice so we had more than just a cheque to present to him. Billy also does fantastic work with athletics in the county and helps to organise many of the school athletic events. To say thanks, the staff and students of St Peter’s presented him with the cakes for his party, which takes place on Saturday. Billy was delighted with the cakes, the donation to the Hospice and with the excellent rendition of Happy Birthday by the whole school! We were delighted to welcome Billy to the school and we hope to turn our non-uniform days for the Hospice into an annual event. Thanks to all who helped out – especially to Ben and Oisín in 5th, who are available for event planning and cake protection!

Shiver me timbers! Sure today be Talk Like A Pirate Day!

Some of us wandered around the school and recorded some students talking like pirates – what do you think? We had great fun! We’re off to the high seas!

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/111247291″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

ps. Ms. Sexton had a cool joke. What is a pirate’s favourite letter? ARRRRRRRRR!

Flickr/kafka4prez

In the first of a series of posts about the wonderful after-school clubs in St. Peter’s, we’d love to introduce you to our Singing Club!

Singing Club is held in the library after-school on Thursdays. It is run by Paddy and Ms. Sexton and everyone is welcome! The group sing lots of different types of music and have sung in the RDS and in the local Gospel Rising celebration.

Our favourite type of music is pop music, and we love karaoke style singing. We will be taking part in the Hallelujah Choir singing competition this year, singing in the RDS, and also hope to play a part in 2014’s Gospel Rising.

Do think you have what it takes to be a part of the group? It costs nothing but your effort counts for everything. We’d love to see you there! Just ask Ms. Sexton or Paddy for more info!

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!

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