St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

6th Class have decided to record their prayers to help them to prepare to celebrate their Confirmation next term.

There are many prayers for us to learn. We have made two full sheets with lots of prayers and we have sent them home to practice every night.

If you are practicing the prayers, it might help to play these podcasts where we are reminded what to say. We can practice the prayers beside the sound. These are the prayers from page one as sent home!

6th Class had an absolutely brilliant day last Friday. We are so excited to tell you all about the great things we did to celebrate Roald Dahl Day. 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. Leon won the competition and we had a laugh-o-meter! Would you like to hear his joke?

2. We then recorded a general podcast about the life of Roald Dahl. It’s an interesting one, have a listen!

3.  We made dream jars to look like the dreams the BFG makes for children. Don’t they look nice?

Our BFG Dream Jars are almost completely finished! #RoaldDahlDay From Luke McK and Sadbh pic.twitter.com/kQnxDcXDJR

— St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) September 12, 2014

 

 

4. We’re also reading ‘The Witches’ by Roald Dahl at the moment!

6th Class have had a 'vunderful' morning of acting out the lines of The Grand High 'Vitch' in 'The Vitches' by Roald Dahl!

— St. Peter's Primary (@StPetersBray) September 11, 2014

5. We decided to write some sentence backwards because Roald did that a lot! 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 our message says?

Our last activity before sos was trying to write words backwards like Roald did in Esio Trot! Can you see the words? pic.twitter.com/aEKDiXh1M3

— St. Peter's Primary (@StPetersBray) September 12, 2014

6. We also made George’s Marvellous Medicine smoothies! They were delicious and so, so healthy!

For our last #RoaldDahlDay fun activity, we're making George's Marvellous Medicine healthy smoothies in 6th Class! pic.twitter.com/4IDf8fbPJV

— St. Peter's Primary (@StPetersBray) September 12, 2014

7. We also watched a really cool video about the life of Roald Dahl.

We watched this great film about Roald Dahl, narrated by @MichaelRosenYes. Have a look! http://t.co/8B3sWe8ejW … From Sam & Jade #RoaldDahl

— St. Peter's Primary (@StPetersBray) September 12, 2014

8. 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 on our Roald Dahl activities. Do you have a favourite Roald Dahl book? Why not let us know which is your favourite in the comments box?

Welcome to this week’s ‘Wednesday for Parents’! As you may know, one of our success stories last week was our involvement in Mathletes, well documented here. Mathletes is a free tournament that aims to change the teaching and learning of Maths in Ireland. It’s an online and in-person competition that uses Khan Academy as a tool to improve the student’s maths skills and knowledge. Today’s ‘Wednesday for Parents’ is all about how you can use Khan Academy as a parent to improve your child’s Maths skills.

So, what is Khan Academy? Khan Academy is a non-profit organisation that aims to provide a world-class education to anyone, anywhere for free. It uses a combination of videos, practice problems and lessons to help students to develop their own learning.

You have the option to open a parent account and sign your child up, using your parent account, or, if your child already has an account, you can link the two accounts to monitor your child. When you sign up (for free), you’re instantly directed to seven tips about using Khan Academy as a family, such as how to monitor their progress, reward their successes and set goals and milestones. There’s also excellent articles on how to support your child’s learning when you don’t know the content and how to motivate different types of learners.

Khan Academy is probably most well-known for its maths education, but also supports science education, art history and economics, among others. One of the first steps when setting up your parent account is to choose something to learn on Khan Academy yourself. The content ranges from the very basic to secondary school content, such as trigonometry.

The content is graded by difficulty, giving the learner a chance to work his/her way up, experiencing success along the way. Your child will master skills gradually and can only move on when they’re completely confident and competent at that level. Khan Academy isn’t just for primary or secondary school students, however. Many college students use it to brush up on long-forgotten skills and to help to learn new ones. If you’d like to read more about how motivating our students found Khan Academy last year, we can recommend this post and this post.

We set up a sample parent account and student account to give you an idea of how you can track your child’s progress. The progress report below tells the parents how long the child spent on Khan Academy, the badges earned and the topics covered.

There’s also an option to access a more detailed report about your child, which informs the parent how the child is progressing in specific skills and allows the parent the option to recommend particular skills for the child to practise.

We highly recommend Khan Academy, particularly for 4th to 6th classes, but there are activities suitable for 2nd class up. If you’ve any further questions about using Khan Academy as a parent, we’d be delighted to answer them. Also, if your child found Khan Academy useful as a learning tool, please leave a comment and let others know!

St Peter’s will be taking part in the first ever Khan Academy Symposium on Saturday 27th September. More info can be found here. As always, you can find all previous ‘Wednesday for Parents’ posts here.

Congratulations to our new Student Council for the new term! They have a very important job to represent our students and make sure they do all that they can to make St. Peter’s be as nice a place as possible for their fellow students. They will come up with lots of ideas to run events, represent their classmates at meetings and also help us to fundraise for charity at Christmas time!

Here are the new members of the Council!

1. 1st Class: Adem Standage and Jack Roche

2. 2nd Class: Ava Byrne and Jerry Wall

3. 3rd Class: Brooke Carey and Jamie Hipwell

4. 4th Class: John O’Brien and Aoife Dolan

5. 5th Class: Hannah Cowap and Alana Murphy

6. 6th Class: Jade Locke and Alan Duda

The Student Council enjoying Ms. Sexton’s (now annual!) start-of-year-cake with our Acting Principal Mr. Foley!

This is their first podcast, have a listen! We can’t wait to see how well they all do on the Council. Well done to everyone!

Can you believe it?! We are so close to our 2,000th comment on the blog! We’re only blogging a year and a half and we’ve had so many wonderful, amazing, supportive comments from our pupils, school community and other schools! Well done everyone!

To celebrate, we’re running a little competition on the blog. We’d love to see the 2,000th comment come in the next few weeks. The 2,000th comment will win a €15 book token! Nobody knows JUST how close we are to it, and we won’t tell you either! It’s all part of the competition!

So get commenting, one and all! Let’s get involved!

ps. If you need a reminder on how to leave a comment, have a look at this video!

If you need convincing that comments are a good idea, have a look at this post. 

6th Class are really enjoying their latest book, ‘The Witches’ by Roald Dahl. It’s a perfect read for this time of year as we have Halloween on our doorstep! It’s also great timing as this Saturday is Roald Dahl Day. Roald Dahl Day is on September 13th every year as that was Roald’s birthday. We can’t wait to read even more into the book and we also plan on watching the movie based on the book in the run up to Halloween!

This is our first podcast and we are delighted with how it came out. Aaron G presented and he did a brilliant job! It is over 5 minutes long. Well done to our new students who have never recorded podcasts before! You did really well.

So, have a listen! This podcast isn’t for the fainthearted…the first four chapters are VERY creepy!

What an exciting start to life in 6th Class. We’re delighted to have six new pupils in our class, and we hope that Jade, Emmet, Sadbh, Taylor, Christian and Davina feel very welcome. We spent the first week and a half getting to know each other, making sure our new pupils know where everything is and who everyone is, setting up our class shop (more on that later!), organising our room, labelling and numbering our books and copies, and doing our autumn tests! We also made out the rotas for cocoa duty, fruit delivery, roll book delivery, PE equipment supervision and Infant helpers for lunchtime. It has been non-stop. We are trying to be very responsible and look after everyone in school. We’ll take a class photo soon and share that with you too!

So what have we been learning? We’ve started all of our new books, and we started reading The Witches, by Roald Dahl. We’ll podcast about that next week! We’ve spent a lot of time on English grammar and Mental Maths and we feel like we’re ready to knuckle down to work hard after a great summer.

Two cool things we did this week related to the All-Ireland Finals that take place in September! [UP THE CATS! – Ms. B :)] We recorded and learned off a poem about the counties of Ireland and we also created our own version of the jerseys that the finalists will be wearing. We hope you like them!

We’ll be back early next week with loads more to share!

Here is our poem…

Here is our Art work…

Here we are enjoying GAA training!

Welcome back to a new year in St Peter’s and to the first ‘Wednesday for Parents’ post of the new year! To start the year, we’ve chosen to look at this year’s programme for Culture Night 2014. This year, it’s on the 19th 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!

Locally, the Mermaid Arts Centre has a workshop in the afternoon with Signal Arts. Last year’s event was all about stop-motion and kick-started our involvement in the Creative Schools Award! Signal Arts are also showcasing a number of community art initiatives – more details can be found here.

There are many events in Dublin city centre that evening- many in places that you wouldn’t usually get to see! We picked out ten that you might be interested in…

1. Croke Park – one of the most popular tours is the Croke Park Tour. You can tour the stadium and the interactive museum. It’s a really popular tour though and needs to be booked in advance.

2. Dublinia – the fantastic Dublinia is always worth a visit and you can visit the History Hunters exhibition about archaeology in Dublin City.

3. Gallery Zozimus – Gallery Zozimus have a special event making ceramics. Apparently a big hit with children!

4. The Ark – continuing with the ceramics theme, the children’s museum, The Ark, is running a special exhibition and ceramics demonstration.

5. Book of Kells – a great opportunity to check out the beautiful Book of Kells in Trinity College!

6. Science Gallery – the Science Gallery is running a fantastic exhibition at the moment called ‘Strange Weather’ – definitely worth a visit!

7. National Print Museum – the National Print Museum has printing demonstrations and fun for all the family!

8. Imaginosity – Imaginosity is always a popular destination with our students and the chance to explore it after-hours is one not to be missed! Booking essential.

9. ECO-UNESCO  – for the little environmentalist in your life – there will be creative recycling workshops, films and story-telling.

10. Áras an Uachtaráin – have you ever wanted to see inside the President’s house? This year, for the first time, Culture Night is offering the opportunity to take a tour around Áras an Uachtaráin. The lottery closes on Friday 5th September so make sure you book early if you’d like to take part!

Let us know if anything else catches your eye from the Culture Night programme (found here) and we’d especially love to hear if you can recommend one of the events! As always, you can find all ‘Wednesday for Parents’ posts can be found here.

We’re delighted to hear that we’ve made it onto the shortlist in the ‘Best Education Blog’ category at the Blog Awards Ireland!

You’ll find out all about the awards here – what a great start to our year, and we’ve only barely begun!

From this…

The 2013-2014 line-up!

…to this!

The 2014-2015 line-up, with over 60 new pupils, including infants and girls!

Well, here we are! Back again to St. Peter’s for another exciting year, one we hope will stand up as one of the best as we welcome back so many familiar faces, and celebrate the arrival of so many new students! After a year of great change and excitement, we opened our doors to over 90 new pupils today, moving from being a senior boys school (with a mixed 2nd Class), to a fully tiered, mixed school. We’re delighted to have Junior, Senior and First Class students in our school for the first time, and we also have girls in every class. It is extremely encouraging for our school to see so many children enrol, and we welcome the many new families to our community.

This is also the first blog post of the 2014-2015 year, and we hope to build on the phenomenal success we had last year in developing our use of blogging to communicate with our parents and the wider community!

So here’s to the future of St. Peter’s, and many more historic and exciting days ahead for our school!