St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

This morning, three of 5th class travelled to Shankill Tennis Club to represent St Peter’s in a local tennis tournament. The boys who took part have been attending tennis sessions with Paddy and Conor from the Sports Promotion Unit every week for the last five weeks. Alan represented the school in the singles competition and came second in the tournament. Sam and Johnny took part in the doubles section and came third.

They played three matches against other local schools and really enjoyed the morning. Thanks to Paddy for travelling with them as their coach and to Mr Kinsella for the lifts. 3rd class are currently taking part in tennis sessions on Thursdays with Paul, thanks to School Completion. It’s a great time to get excited about tennis with Wimbledon coming up!

Yesterday, 5th and 6th class visited Bray Garda station as part of our Community Garda, Stephen’s, work with the school. He visited 5th class a couple of weeks ago so we were really interested to see everything that we’d learned about. You can read our previous post here.

We had a really interesting morning in Bray Garda station and we got to see the squad cars, the cells, the medical room, the interview room and the control room where all the emergency calls for County Wicklow come into. We also got to see the CCTV footage from the cameras around Bray. Stephen was really generous with his time and answered the many, many, MANY questions that the students had for him. Thanks a million to Stephen and all the Gardaí at Bray Garda Station for letting us visit.

We made a podcast in 5th class to record what we learned from yesterday’s visit – thanks to Alan for leading the podcast so well!

(As there’s so much interest in and excitement about the 32 County Challenge, we’ve made this post a sticky – don’t forget to scroll down to catch up on all the rest of our news!)

Last Thursday Mr. Foley, Paddy and Mr. Kinsella came around to all the classes and made a big announcement. A couple of the boys had figured it out from the article in this week’s Bray People Newspaper (Wednesday 4^th June).

So what was the announcement? We here at St. Peter’s are currently planning our biggest ever fundraiser to be held at the end of June. On Sunday June 22^nd, the three teachers plan on driving through all 32 counties in Ireland in less than 24 hours, getting a picture at each “Welcome to…” county road sign. As if that feat alone wasn’t hard enough, the boys and girls have set some challenges for the trip which include doing hand stands, reciting poetry, and eating a Big Mac as quick as we can, to name but a few. (A special mention has to go to Paddy Mullen who has been training extremely hard to master the 3^rd challenge)!!!

So what’s the reason for the 32 County Challenge? The reason behind the challenge is to celebrate the announcement that from August this year, St. Peter’s will become fully co-educational taking in boys and girls from Junior Infants to Sixth Class. With bigger numbers in the school our target is to raise money towards a new portable school stage for our Christmas Play, the highlight of the school year.

In regards fundraising, we’ve been working tirelessly to sell sponsorship of counties to businesses and retailers in Bray and thankfully we have had a great response. For their sponsorship they will have their business name, logo and details in a photo at a county sign on our trip. This photo will be uploaded to our twitter account (@stpetersbray), and our award winning school blog (www.stpetersbrayblog.com ). We will also be keeping everyone up-to-date with live feeds of our progress on the day.

Probably the most excitement in the school though is coming from the boys and girls own fundraising. The class who raises the most money, along with the boy or girl who raises the most individually in each class, get to experience the Peter’s Projection Room. A specially designed, state of the art, cinema constructed in the school Library for the day, complete with Movie, Popcorn, Drinks and Goodies.

As if the possibility of a cinema experience was exciting enough, for every €10 raised by each student they will receive a raffle ticket. Top prize in the raffle is a brand new bike worth €200. 2^nd Prize is a brand new mobile phone and 3^rd, 4^th and 5^th prizes of free places in the School Summer Activity Camp.

Hello bloggers from around the world!

We have been very busy over the past couple of weeks in class. We have been doing our lego videos and they are almost finished. We will be finishing them this week. We will put them up on our next blog post when they are done. We are doing it in three different groups. Have a look out for them next week!

We found out we are going on our School Trip to Fort Lucan in two weeks time.

We just finished our seventh class novel of the year – “Holes” by Louis Sachar. A lot of us thought it was the best one. We did a vote on all the books we have read. We all did a book review on our favourite book from the last year.

We also heard big news that Mr. Foley, Mr. Kinsella and Paddy are going to try and drive around the 32 counties in 24 hours. At each county they have to do different challenges and tasks that will be set by pupils in the school! They are trying to raise money for a new stage for our Christmas Play. We have started bringing in our sponsorship money.

We have smashed last year’s attendance record and are still beating it every day. Hopefully we can keep it up over the next two weeks. Today, Wednesday, we have 144 greens!

We will be doing the draw for the Bray Wanderers vs Bohemians match today. Four boys will be going to it this Friday night with Mr. Foley and Paddy.

We had Mega-Assembly 2014 which gave lots of updates on what has been going on in the school.

We had our photos taken by a photographer in the school last week.

Soon Sixth Class will be playing the teachers. Hopefully the teachers don’t cheat again!

On Friday week, we will be doing the Mini World Cup in the school. It will be in the afternoon. We had Bike Day last Friday and it was great fun.

We have finished our assessment folders. It’s good to look back and see all the good scores we got and all the green faces.

The five boys who went to Dublin Castle were in the Wicklow Times this week. Jack B was in it! The school has been in the newspaper for a lot of things this year.

We hope you enjoy this blog post and we will be back next week with another one.

By everyone in 4th Class (all 19 of us!)

As you all know, the 2014 World Cup finals kick off in Brazil on Thursday!

Football is the most popular sport in the world, and the World Cup is the biggest sports competition in the world involving only one single sport.

In every country, football is run by a group called a ‘Football Association’ (for example, in Ireland we have the ‘Football Association of Ireland’). Every football association is part of FIFA, which organises the World Cup. Every country’s team takes part. First every team plays against other teams from the same continent. The best 32 teams then go to the World Cup Finals.

The tournament began in 1930 and is played every four years (except in 1942 and 1946, when it was not held because of the Second World War).

In the 2014 competition, 32 teams will play 64 games in 12 stadiums around Brazil. The first match takes place on June 12, and the final will take place on July 13. 

How the tournament works

Teams are split into eight groups of four. Groups are designed to have teams from as many different continents as possible.

Within each group, every team plays every other team. This means every country gets to play at least three matches.

• Group A: Brazil, Croatia, Mexico, Cameroon.
  Click here for a fact book about Group A!
• Group B: Spain, Netherlands, Chile, Australia.
  Click here for a fact book about Group B!
• Group C: Colombia, Greece, Ivory Coast, Japan.
  Click here for a fact book about Group C!
• Group D: Uruguay, Costa Rica, England, Italy.
  Click here for a fact book about Group D!
• Group E: Switzerland, Ecuador, France, Honduras.
  Click here for a fact book about Group E!
• Group F: Argentina, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Iran, Nigeria.
  Click here for a fact book about Group F!
• Group G: Germany, Portugal, Ghana, United States.
  Click here for a fact book about Group G!
• Group H: Belgium, Algeria, Russia, South Korea.
  Click here for a fact book about Group H!

The best two teams from each group go into the knockout stage. There, the 16 teams play a knockout tournament – any team that loses is eliminated.

The teams play for the World Cup Trophy, which has been given to the winner of every tournament since 1974.

2nd Class are supporting our own teams!

Every pupil in 2nd Class has chosen two teams to support. Every pupil will learn about the counties they have chosen, and follow their players throughout the tournament!

2nd Class are picking teams to follow in the #WorldCup14! We will learn things about the countries from each other!

— St. Peter's Primary (@StPetersBray) June 6, 2014

Caoilynn got Switzerland and Greece in the #WorldCup2014 draw! Dylan F got Argentina and Ecuador! Nathan got Colombia and Mexico!

— St. Peter's Primary (@StPetersBray) June 6, 2014

Ryan got Australia and the USA, Abbi got Honduras and Belgium! Kia was *so* lucky and got Germany and Spain! #WorldCup2014

— St. Peter's Primary (@StPetersBray) June 6, 2014

Kayden got South Korea & Uruguay, Dean D got Nigeria & Portugal, Kelsey got Brazil & Cameroon and Dylan M got Ghana & France! #WorldCup2014

— St. Peter's Primary (@StPetersBray) June 6, 2014

Dean T will follow The Netherlands & Croatia, Jamie got Algeria & England and Codie got Russia & Chile #WorldCup2014

— St. Peter's Primary (@StPetersBray) June 6, 2014

Casey will support Costa Rica & Bosnia, Caithlin got Iran & Japan and Billy will cheer for The Ivory Coast and Italy! #WorldCup2014

— St. Peter's Primary (@StPetersBray) June 6, 2014

We'll learn facts about our countries next week. It will make #WorldCup2014 great fun for us!

— St. Peter's Primary (@StPetersBray) June 6, 2014

11 fun facts about the World Cup!

1. Eight different teams have won the World Cup.

Brazil have won the most World Cups, wining the competition five times. The other winners are Italy (4 times); Germany (3 times); Argentina and Uruguay (twice each); and England, France, and Spain (once each).

2. The FIFA World Cup is the most-watched sporting event in the world.

An estimated 715 million people watched the 2006 World Cup final between Italy and France on TV. That’s one out of every eight people on the whole planet! Wow!

3. Brazil striker Ronaldo holds the record for the most goals in the World Cup.

He played in three tournaments: 1998, 2002 and 2006. This video has all 15 of his goals!

4. The next three World Cups…

…will be hosted by Brazil in 2014, Russia in 2018, and Qatar in 2022.

5. The original World Cup trophy was called the ‘Jules Rimet Trophy’.

It was named after the president of FIFA, Jules Rimet, who created the World Cup competition.

In 1970 Brazil won the trophy for a third time, so they were allowed to keep it forever. In the picture here, you can see the famous Brazilian footballer Pele, kissing the old trophy which Brazil were allowed to keep.

A new trophy was made for the competition in 1974 and has been used ever since.

6. Brazil is the only country to take part in every single World Cup since it began in 1930.

Even though football was invented in England, the English team did not take part in the first three World Cups. This is partly because the first tournament was held in Uruguay in South America, which was a very long journey for teams from Europe.

7. 2014 will be the 20th time that the World Cup has taken place.

Out of the previous 19, the host country has won the competition six times: Uruguay in 1930, Italy in 1934, England in 1966, West Germany in 1974, Argentina in 1978, and France in 1998.

8. The competition in 2014 will be the first to use special technology.

The referee in every game will wear a special watch, which can tell him when the ball has crossed the goal line. This means there will be no mistakes when the ball crosses the line and the referee can give a goal only when the ball has definitely crossed the line.

Referees will also be able to use a special spray, to draw a line on the ground where players have to stand for a free kick. The line will then disappear a few minutes later, so there is no mark left on the ground. Magic!

9. Time to take a break!

Because Brazil is a very hot country, players will have to take breaks in the middle of games. As well as the half-time break, there will be a break in the middle of each half, so that the players and officials can have a drink and stay cool.

10. The Republic of Ireland team has qualified for three World Cups – 1990, 1994 and 2002.

The best performance was in 1990, where Ireland made it all the way to the quarter-finals.

The whole country was so proud of the team and the manager, Jack Charlton – who had already won the World Cup as a player with England in 1966. Huge crowds went to Dublin to welcome the team home.

11. Have you ever heard about the dog who saved the World Cup?

In 1966 the old World Cup trophy was stolen a few months before the competition was held in England. FIFA were very upset – how could they hold a World Cup if there was no trophy to give to the winners?

Thankfully, it was found by a dog named Pickles who was out for a walk with his owner, David Corbett. Pickles smelled something strange in a hedge and found the trophy, which was wrapped up in old newspapers.

Pickles was treated like a hero and when England won the World Cup in 1966, the Queen invited Pickles and his owner to the official victory party to see the trophy again.

Have some fun at home for the World Cup!

There’s loads of material online for you to download to enjoy the fun of the World Cup at home.

• Here is a World Cup poster you can download and print out (and here is another version you can colour in for yourself!)
• Here’s a display of the flags of every country taking part in the World Cup.
• Every country wears a different style of shirt. Use these worksheets to design your own kit for every country!
• Can you defeat the World Cup Trivia Challenge?
• Here you can write a World Cup Story of your own!
• Download and print out some of these World Cup trading cards – and then swap them with your friends!
• Design your own World Cup bookmark!

Welcome to our weekly online newsletter, the St Peter’s Post! This week was a short one as we were off for Monday and Tuesday, but we packed plenty into our three days. We had a visitor from Tasmania, Wicklow Sports and Bike Week, along with posts about our own Sports Day and our participation in the Excited Festival.

The main headlines from last week were:

• We took part in the EXCITED Digital Learning Festival last Saturday and had a fantastic time. Read all about it here.
• We blogged about our Sports Day – check out our podcast, Vines and Animotos here!
• We’d a very special visitor on Wednesday. Sue Wyatt is a teacher from Tasmania, who came to talk to us all about blogging and Australia. Read all about her visit here and her account of her visit on her pet Tasmanian Devil’s blog here.
• Shell, who is Alex and Caoilynn’s mum, sent us photos of the First Holy Communion Day through Twitter. Read all about the day and watch the Animoto of the photos here. Thanks a million, Shell!
• We took part in Bike Day on Friday – read all about what Bike Day entails here.
• 5th class started their new Design and Make project by researching Bray Seafront. Check out their afternoon here.
• 2nd class had a brilliant ‘Roots of Empathy’ session and a fantastic podcast. Listen to it here.
• ‘Wednesday for Parents’ was all about the Bucket and Spade List. What is a Bucket and Spade List? Find out here.

In other news this week:

• There was a really exciting announcement from Mr Foley, Paddy and Mr Kinsella – they’re taking on a very cool challenge as a fundraiser for the school. You might have seen it in the Bray People this week – they’re attempting to drive around the 32 counties in 24 hours! There’ll be a lot more about this fantastic challenge on the blog over the next few weeks and they really appreciate all the support so far.
• Best of luck to all past pupils and older brothers and sisters sitting exams at the moment!
• We’d a great day at the Wicklow Sports, organised by Cumann na mBunscol. Well done to all the participants

Having great fun in the parade! #WicklowSports pic.twitter.com/hsg6TKFLpv

— St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) June 4, 2014

•  World Cup fever is building in St Peter’s – 2nd class have chosen their countries already!

• 5th class are using SketchUp to plan their STEM projects – we’re looking forward to seeing what they get up to!

5th are planning their designs for #Bray seafront using SketchUp #stem pic.twitter.com/iLLq00Uwen

— St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) June 6, 2014

• Tommy was in on Friday to coach Gaelic football – we all really look forward to his visits. His good nature and sense of fun makes him a really popular part of St Peter’s!
• 4th class continued their work on their stop-motion films. We can’t wait to see the finished films!
• Lots of talk in 6th class about graduation this week – we can’t believe that it’s almost time for them to move on. We’re looking forward to the Student-Teacher soccer match!

As always, you can find all of our previous St Peter’s Posts here and now, on the website, we’ve included space for the St Peter’s Posts so that visitors to the website can keep up with all of our weekly news. You can access the latest St Peter’s Post at the bottom of the front page of the website or you can click on this link to see them all!

Last Saturday, St. Peter’s had the huge honour of showcasing their technology and ICT use in Dublin Castle at the Excited Digital Learning Conference. We were invited to participate having completed the Digital Schools of Distinction adjudication. It has been an incredible year for St. Peter’s, and we have worked to improve and enhance our use of ICT at every level in the school. This has led to great success at a national level, and we have been successful in the national Eircom Junior Spiders awards, the national Mathletes finals and we have also won a Creative Schools award for use of photograph/technology to present stop-motion projects.

Team Peter’s having a ball at the conference!

The Excited Conference was a two-day event that celebrated everything that schools like ours are trying to achieve with technology and digital learning. Archie (6th), Leon (5th), Jack B (4th), Finn (3rd) and Kelsey (2nd) represented our students at the event. We had a stand and we showed off our blog, website, podcasts, videos, stop-motion animations, our use of Khan Academy and our use of social media generally.

Check out some of the amazing things we saw! We loved seeing the work of other schools and asking them about their work. We were really impressed with the Lego displays, and we want to try out Lego Mindstorms as soon as possible!

Lots of people came to chat to us about our work. Our students represented us so well, and everyone was very impressed with the lovely stand that Ms. Sexton put together before we came in from Bray on the DART. We had some major highlights, including meeting Marty Cooper (the inventor of the mobile phone!) and Dr. René Lydiksen who works for Lego – a real life Lego man! René invited a number of schools up on stage for his keynote address and we were delighted to be one of them. Our fantastic five said that it was like being part of the Late Late Toy Show, which has to be the ultimate compliment. We then got to see Stephen Howell from Microsoft showcase Project Spark, a game creation tool. We thought it looked really cool and then we got to try it out at our stand afterwards with Stephen! We also met Sean O’Sullivan, from Dragon’s Den, who was really impressed with our work in the Mathletes Challenge.

Thanks to all who organised the day, especially Minister Ciaran Cannon and Bernard Kirk (who sent 3rd class all of the amazing Lego). Thanks to Neal from Digital Schools and to Ger McHugh from Dublin West Education Centre, who were so helpful in preparing for the day. It was a brilliant day and we really enjoyed it!

Getting our photo taken with Minister Cannon!

Don’t miss a full run-down of the day and catch all of our photos on the animoto video below!

Archie and Sean O’Sullivan from The Dragons Den!

This is the official highlights video!

5th class have started their final Design and Make project of the year and today, we started our research and planning. The task is to design something that would be suitable for the seafront in Bray and that uses electricity. We’re going to plan our designs using SketchUp and then build them in class. We’ve done a lot of preparation work on Design and Make and electricity.

Today, we went to Bray Seafront on a research mission. We were deciding where we would place our project on the seafront and we were also evaluating what would fit in well down there. We had looked at Bray Seafront on Google Earth and we see it regularly when we visit it, but it was really important to visit it in person. We found that we got lots of new ideas as we walked around and everyone is looking forward to getting started.

Here are some of the photos of where we would like to place our projects:

A good central spot for Adam’s project!

Sam, Johnny and Davy are going to redesign Carlisle Grounds!

It has to be Bray Head for Luke and Ryan’s project.

You won’t guess what Leon and Aaron are planning to build!

The harbour is perfect for Ben, Luke and Alan!

Next to Finnbee’s cafe made this the perfect place for Ois and Aaron!

Checking the place out for a suitable place to build!

Considering the bandstand as a location before the walk home!

Thanks a million to Ms Mitchell, who came with us for the walk!

Our latest Roots of Empathy theme is ‘Who am I?’. We are learning about Baby T’s personality. Our Roots of Empathy journey is almost at an end! We have had an amazing time with Baby T and Gwen. They are so nice to us and we have learned so much. Check out our latest podcast to keep up to date on our Roots of Empathy work!

Tomorrow we’ll have another highlight of the school year…Bike Day! This year we will celebrate our fifth annual day where we all bring in our bikes and helmets and promote safe cycling. Organised by Paddy, it is an opportunity to display skill and balance as we remind ourselves how it is important to be careful on our bikes, especially over the summer months!