St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

This week’s student of the week is Nathan O’ Brien AGAIN!!

Nathan has worked extremely hard in every subject all week, his homework has improved greatly and

he has had a wonderful, polite and positive attitude towards his classmates and teachers.

Well Done Nathan, keep it up!!

Yesterday we posted half of the prayers for students preparing for Confession and Communion. This is the second set, to match the second page sent home to practice ahead of Confession on May 20th and Communion on May 25th.

Hello bloggers around the world! Today we did a podcast of our Irish story called Mamó. Everyone in the class called out the first and the last box from the story. We used our random name picker to give out the boxes from the story.

Each boy in the class got to call out a box on their own. Before we started recording Mr. Foley let us practice a little bit. Everyone did really well. Jack B got the tongue twister! Try it for yourself; shuigh siad síos sa seomra suí!

Mr. Foley deleted the first part of the story by mistake (again!) but we were able to do it again, and our second time was even better. In the end we listened to it back and we thought we didn’t sound the same. We all sounded completely different! We also tweeted that we did this, and we used the hashtags #Mamó, #Irish, and #BunGoBarr.

We hope you enjoy our podcast below, we enjoyed doing it!

By Luke, Dylan W, Alex, Carl, Calvin, Tommy, Jack B, Alan, Stephen, Dylan M, Mason, Jack J, and Abhishek

Some of the art the boys prepared for the church last year.

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!

Congratulations to our news Student Council for Term 3. They are:

1. Kayden Clucas Doonan (2nd)

2. Casey Crinion (2nd)

3. Adam Doyle (3rd)

4. TJ Nolan (3rd)

5. Johnny Moorehouse (4th)

6. Calvin O’Callaghan (4th)

7. Luke O’Brien (5th)

8. Luke McKeever (5th)

9. Lester Grefaldeo (6th)

10. Dylan Kane (6th)

Here is their introductory podcast!

2nd Class are really enjoying their latest book, Zac Power’s ‘Tomb of Doom’. It’s an excellent book, full of adventure and surprise. We recorded a podcast this morning to fill you in on all we have learned in the book so far. We also practice saying our ‘Good Reader tips’ that help us to understand what we are reading and answer even  more questions.

You can hear our previous Zac Power podcasts (abour Frozen Fear) here:

1. Chapter 1-3 

2. Chapters 4-5

Remember, you can catch our previous book/reading podcasts on the blog by clicking on the title!

1. The Magic Finger

2. The Giraffe, The Pelly and Me

3. Esio Trot

4. Care of Henry

5. Alfie Green and the Magical Gift

The weather over the Easter holidays reminded us all that Summer is on the way and this week’s Wednesday for Parents focuses on getting healthy as we all finally come out of hibernation and crawl out from under the duvet!

We were delighted to see our students arrive back after the holidays looking fresh and healthy after all the playing outdoors. One of our priorities in St Peter’s is to encourage healthy living amongst our students  – mainly thanks to Paddy! Along with our PE sessions, we’re lucky to welcome Tommy, our GAA coach, in on Fridays. We also have weekly athletic sessions with Paddy, two sports-based after-school clubs and our latest addition, Cyber Coach, which encourages our students to get active with videos of dance and step routines.

Looking around the web, our first choice has to be Safe Food, who have a great website with lots of tips to get healthy. They focus on six different factors:

• Reducing portion sizes
• Managing treat sizes
• Replacing sugary drinks
• Making being active fun
• Less screen-time
• Encouraging more sleep

Although the focus of the Safe Food campaign is to combat childhood obesity, it’s also really important for developing healthy habits early on and for using nutrition to feel happier and healthier.

For teens, the MiYo app has recently been launched by SpunOut.ie. It’s designed to help your teen track their well-being by keeping a journal of sorts of the following activities: healthy eating, sleep quality, physical activity, talking to friends and family, learning and socialising/hobbies. You can read more about it here.

Finally, if you’re thinking ahead and looking for outdoor activities around Ireland this Summer, the Fun for Families section of Discover Ireland is excellent!

If you’ve any particular challenges planned for your family this Summer, let us know – we’d love to create a post of suggestions for Summer activities in a month or two and we’d really appreciate your help!

As always, you can find all previous Wednesday for Parents posts here.

Since February, we’ve been taking part in the Mathletes Schools Challenge. You can read all about our progress here , here and here. We’ve been holding strong in the top 7 of the leaderboards in the country (even over the Easter holidays) and recently we received word that 18 of our 5th and 6th class students have qualified for the Leinster finals of the Student Challenge.

This is a remarkable achievement, especially considering that only eighty 5th and 6th class students in Leinster qualified. Our Maths whizzes in 5th and 6th would be able to tell you that 23% of the eligible Leinster finalists attend St Peter’s! This is a remarkable achievement and we’re very proud of our students.

12 of the students eligible will be attending DCU next Saturday. By now, you should have received the information email from SOSventures with all the details, but if you need them, let us know and we can print down a copy. Some families were looking for directions to DCU and you can access them in the map below. If you’re planning to take public transport, you have a number of options, outlined here. Let us know if there’s any way we can help you out!

Congratulations to all of our students on their achievement and we’re really looking forward to cheering them on next Saturday!

View Larger Map

Welcome to our online weekly newsletter – our first St Peter’s Post of the third term. It’s been a very exciting week in St Peter’s and we’re sure that everyone by now has heard that good things come in twos! On Tuesday, we were over the moon to be awarded two awards in the Eircom Junior Spiders… and then on Thursday, we were over the moon to hear of two new arrivals to the St Peter’s family. Congratulations to Ms Whyte and Mr Vance  on the birth of their beautiful baby daughters!

So let’s get stuck in to the headlines of the week:

• On Tuesday, Oisín, Tommy, James, Caoilynn and Ms Brennan were lucky enough to visit the Foundry to represent St Peter’s at the Junior Spiders. Read all about their very exciting day here.
• You can read all the messages of good luck on our ‘This is the day!’ post here.
• Our students and teacher were interviewed by Today FM about the Junior Spiders – listen to it here.
• We also submitted our Creative Schools project this week – there’s lots to read and watch on the post here!
• If you enjoy the stop-motion on that post, you have to see the stop motion film from Jordan in 4th class here.
• 3rd class also posted a stop-motion film this week called ‘The Chase’. Watch it here.
• We’re starting to post our Discover Primary Science work over the next couple of weeks – check out the excellent work from Ms Mitchell’s class on Sound here.
• This week was #artweek14, where schools are encouraged to engage with Digital Art. You can read all about it here.
• It was Tech Week Ireland also and we celebrated technology in schools as part of the week. Read all about it here.
• 2nd class engaged with #artweek14 by trying out apps and experimenting with pop art. See their work here.
• 5th class used SketchUp this week to take part in #artweek14 and #techweekirl – check out their work here.
• Ms Mitchell’s class did really well this week. Find out who the students of the week were here and who presented the work of the week here.
• Looking for a reading suggestion? Ms Mitchell’s class are really enjoying ‘The Twits’ by Roald Dahl

In other headlines this week:

• We were delighted to find out that 18 of our students qualified for the Provincial Finals of Mathletes. We’re extremely proud of our students and looking forward to cheering them on in DCU on May 10th.
• On the topic of Mathletes, we’d like to congratulate Eduard from 6th class who came in 8th place in the April leaderboards for 6th class!
• Check out our Junior Spiders badges sitting proudly to the right of our blog!
• 2nd and 5th class held a FaceTime chat with Scoil Íde, Corbally about the use of technology in both schools. It went really well and we were fascinated by their use of Lego Mindstorms!

Tommy and Caoilynn are telling @ScoilIde about our @Juniorspiders awards! #techweekirl pic.twitter.com/rjz1ntuEiv

— St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) May 2, 2014

• 5th class voted every day this week for their favourite pieces of art as part of building an online museum for #artweek14.

• Our senior classes enjoyed lunchtime tag rugby with Paddy this week – the weather at the start of the week was perfect for it!

What a day for lunchtime tag rugby! Sixth class are loving the sunshine! pic.twitter.com/406yGrX2lQ

— St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) April 29, 2014

• We had Maths4fun this week – thanks to the Parents’ Council for organising it!

• 5th class learned about Brown Bag Films and ‘Give up yer aul sins’ in our comprehension lesson – we cracked up laughing watching the short films! Can you believe they were made in 2001?

• We had a really feel-good assembly celebrating the Junior Spiders, the Mathletes Provincial Finals and the new student council reps – well done to our outgoing student council and thanks for all your hard work!

Congratulations to our new Student Council reps! pic.twitter.com/G9C7YoozJR

— St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) April 30, 2014

• We tried out Cyber Coach this week and were really impressed – another great way to keep us moving. Ms Byrne’s 3rd class start off every day with movement and stretching – we’re looking forward to following in their footsteps!

We’ve started dancing with Cyber Coach today in 4th, great fun! #excited pic.twitter.com/Z5bqU7et7w — St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) May 1, 2014

• 5th and 6th classes are reading ‘War Horse’ at the moment and 5th class finished it this week. Luckily for them, the next lunchtime was a wet day so they were able to start watching the film. They were very interested in the differences between the book and the film.

• Baby T was in for Roots of Empathy – he’s getting so big! 2nd class love welcoming him into St Peter’s.

Guess who is here! @RootsofEmpathy #rootsofempathy pic.twitter.com/8h3YEcBs1g

— St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) May 1, 2014

So there you have it – a hectic week by all accounts.

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!

This week’s student of the week prize was shared by Johnny Moorehouse and Nathan O’Brien!

Both boys had full attendance, full uniform and were on time all week!

They worked extra hard, especially with their morning maths and phonic sentences.

They were polite to eachother and their classmates and behaved well all week- well done boys!