St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

Hi all bloggers!

Last Friday we planted sunflower seeds and learnt about the lifecycle of a seed.
We learned that seeds need water,sunlight, soil and air to grow.

First we needed a plastic cup, a big bag of soil, 2 seeds each and a 1/4 of a cup of water.
We filled the cup 3/4 full with soil. We made a hole in the middle with our fingers. We our 2 seeds inside seperately. We covered them over with soil and pat them down. We added a 1/4 cup of water and put our cups in the window sill so that they would catch the sunlight and air.

We are so excited to watch them grow over the next few weeks and months.
Arturas is going to be watering them every day!

By Johnny and Ben ( and Arturas helped a bit!)

We got a very exciting Tweet on Saturday evening from Sean O’Sullivan, who launched Mathletes with Ciaran Cannon, a Minister for State in the Department of Education. You might know Sean O’Sullivan from the programme ‘Dragons Den’ and he’s famous around the world as an inventor, an entrepreneur and an investor. We’re big fans of Khan Academy and Mathletes and we’ve posted two updates since we’ve started here and here.

So, what did it say in the Tweet?

Overall best @MATHletes_ie primary school in Leinster (from Bray, Wicklow) St Peter’s Primary #GoMathletes

— Sean OSullivan (@sosventures) March 29, 2014

Congratulations to 5th and 6th class for all their hard work – they’ve been working really hard in school and at home and we’re delighted to see it paying off! We really enjoy taking part in Mathletes through Khan Academy so 5th class made a podcast to discuss why they think it’s worthwhile – we’d love to see more schools from Co. Wicklow involved!

Welcome to our weekly online newsletter – the St Peter’s Post! We’re very proud of all the great work from our students this week – from Write-A-Book, to stop-motion, to Gaelic tournaments  – and plenty more in between! The headlines from the week are:

• Jordan from 4th class has posted his trailer for his stop-motion movie. He has TWENTY-THREE comments on his trailer so far and was so excited to announce it at assembly on Friday! You can be number 24 here.
• The Write A Book winners were announced this week. Congratulations to Casey, Luke, Ben and Kyle. The prize-giving ceremony is on Monday evening. 4th class wrote about their Write-A-Book winner, Luke, here.
• The Gaelic football team were at a tournament on Friday and really enjoyed themselves. Read the post from Ben, Oisín, Johnny and Andy here.
• Ms Mitchell’s class were celebrating great work this week! Well done to Arturas, Nathan, Johnny and Kyle.
• 2nd class had a fantastic podcast this week updating everyone on their Roots of Empathy work.
• Last week, we had our Seachtain na Gaeilge concert – 3rd class posted their Stop-Motion as Gaeilge that they showcased at the concert. You can see it here.
• From the same concert, 5th posted their version of ‘An Prionsa Úr’ here.
• 2nd class are busy reading ‘Zac Power: Frozen Fear’ – listen to their latest podcast here.
• Ms Mitchell’s class made beautiful daffodils for Daffodil Day. Check them out here.
• 5th class were planting this week as part of the Incredible Edibles project. Check out our photos here.
• Our ‘Wednesday for Parents’ post this week introduced the Scoilnet site for parents.
• We had more ‘Maths for Fun’ this week and we really enjoyed it. Check out the post from Ms Mitchell’s class here.
• Finally, we said ‘goodbye’ to our visitor – Brigid the Biodiversity Bee – this week. Second class gave here a great send-off, which you can see here.

In other news this week:

• We had a video call with Scoil Íde from Corbally this week. We told them about the MakeyMakey and they told us about the NanoWow project. We really enjoyed the call and we hope to work with them again in the future!

We’ve started FaceTime with @StPetersBray to discuss #stem . Oisin is explaining #MakeyMakey pic.twitter.com/Ap795II662 — Scoil Ide Corbally (@ScoilIde) March 27, 2014

•  ‘Do this in Memory’ was a great success last week – there’s only one more before the Communion ceremony. We’re very proud of 2nd class and their participation.
• We registered for Digital Art Week! We can’t wait for it to start on the 28th April.
• 5th class tested their Pinwheels from their STEM Design and Make this week. Blog post to follow on Monday!
• We tweeted our responses during our music lesson to’The
• We answered word problems set by sixth class in St Patrick’s NS in Celbridge.

@MissWardsClass Bob had 3960 sweets. Rob had 360 sweets. We think! — St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) March 26, 2014

• 2nd class made beautiful bracelets and necklaces with clay for Mother’s Day.

2nd Class are proud of their Mother’s Day necklaces. We used clay and our paper stampers for the heart. #edchatie pic.twitter.com/tUeVopKesB — St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) March 28, 2014

• We were delighted to get a lovely response from one of our parents:

@StPetersBray ..I was absolutely delighted with my new jewellery for Mother’s Day, perfect idea guys.. X — Shell White (@Shell8031) March 28, 2014

• Among the other art for Mother’s Day is this beautiful card from Luke in 6th class!

Luke from 6th made the most beautiful Mother’s Day card! pic.twitter.com/9UyJC37nM8 — St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) March 28, 2014

•    We’d great fun in our Creative Schools after-school club. Andrei, Tommy, Patryk and Adam were in flying form as they worked on their stop-motion animations!
• We’ve been getting set up for the Engineering Showcase on the 8th of April. We can’t wait to welcome Scientific Sue to St Peter’s!

So, there’s a snapshot of the week in St Peter’s! As always, you can find all of our previous St Peter’s Posts here and now, with the new 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!

Today, the senior Gaelic football team took part in a blitz in Ballinakill, the new Centre of Excellence near Rathdrum. We were delighted to be runners-up in the blitz today!

Our first match was against Kilbride. We won by one point. Jordan Whyte scored the first goal of the day for St Peter’s.

We lost our second match to Donard. Ben Gorman showcased his skill in that game by dummying the ball.

We played Kilmacanogue in our third match and we won. Dylan Kane scored a cracker of a goal. He took his bounce, his steps, then a solo then hammered it past the keeper.

Ballinakill is deadly – there are radios in the dressing rooms and the building is huge, with loads of facilities. There’s plenty of pitches and it reminded us of the great facilities in our local club, Bray Emmets.

Thanks to Paddy, Conor from the Sports Promotion Unit and Ms Hughes for coming with us and supporting us in our matches.

By Johnny, Ben, Andy and Oisín

This week Johnny, Arturas, Nathan K  and Ryan  made huge improvements in their spellings and tables tests.

They are working hard to be the best and we know that they are doing their learning homework every night.

Ms. Whyte popped in to our room to  congratulate the boys and give them  all prize stickers.

Well Done boys, keep it up!

Nathan has won “work of the week”  which is displayed outside our classroom door on the corridor for everyone to see as they pass by. This week Nathan’s spellings and times tables’ test won…he got 100% in both tests!!! Nathan knows all of the times tables from x1 up to x10, even when we muddle them up! This is amazing as Nathan is only in 2nd class!

Arturas has yet again student of the week!

He has worked very hard to know his spellings, tables and reading words every day!

He has had full attendance this week and completed his homework every night!

Well done Arturas!!

We celebrated Daffodil Day today by making our own daffodils!

They are very easy to make, you could  even try it at home!

Here’s Ryan to tell you “How to”!

“We got a yellow piece of card and we traced our hands with pencil.

Next we cut out our hand prints.

Then we folded them in the middle and put the straws in  the middle too.

We sellotaped the straw inside.

After that we added green leaves to the stem.

We are going to give them to our Mam’s for Mother’s day on Sunday because they are so beautiful!”

Yesterday, we got a very exciting package in the post – it was the planting pack from AgriAware. We love taking part in the AgriAware Incredible Edibles project every year. You can see our planting post from last year here.

This year, Oisín was our photographer and he captured all the fun of the afternoon. We took the opportunity to plant immediately because we’ve been dodging raindrops all week so we were delighted to get some dry weather yesterday afternoon!

We’ll keep you updated on the progress of our plants. We grew spring flowers earlier in the year, which turned out really well so we hope we have green fingers!

As you know, we have had a VIP visitor in St. Peter’s since before St. Patrick’s Day.

Brigid came to visit us, and we were curious about what kind of a bee she was ever since our Polly got an invitation to visit her! It was lovely when she came to stay and play with Polly. This morning when we came in, she was gone! She has flown back to Greystones. Thanks to our friends in St. Bridget’s for allowing her to visit us. They are the best bloggers and tweeters! We loved having Bridget to stay. Here a send off podcast for Bridget.