St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

This week, 6th class have been learning all about Space. They’ve been learning about space travel and about the planets. They’ve also started writing their science fiction stories. Next week, they’re going to have a debate on whether the Moon Landing was a hoax by examining the different videos out there! Today, they made beautiful chalk drawings of the planets. Well done to Patryk, who photographed all of the pictures for the blog post:

2nd Class have been learning about where Wicklow is on the map. We’re learning about counties that are near to us, and comparing our county to other counties and places in Ireland! We knew of some of the names of other places but we wanted to get even better at knowing places from all over Ireland.

Today, during Golden Time we recorded a poem that we found online. It’s a fun rhyme to help us to learn the names of all of the counties in Ireland. Have a listen up above to hear what we have to say!

ps. We helped out a famous VIP with Irish roots who was struggling to learn all of the names! 😉

Barack Obama on the Irish counties! by stpetersbrayblog on GoAnimate

Congratulations to the St. Peter’s Senior football team who were runners-up in the Division 3 final of the North Wicklow League. Mr. Foley presented them with their medals during school assembly on Friday. The boys were narrowly defeated by St. Laurence’s after a great display. By coming second in their division, they qualified for a Wicklow tournament in the Centre of Excellence in Ballinakill, Rathdrum.

Special mention must go to Eduard Grefaldeo who played in goal and only conceded one goal in four games, and to Jordan Whyte who won Player of the Tournament. Well done for showing such great leadership guys!

Thanks to Paddy and all at the SPU (Conor and Mary) for helping the lads to make it all the way to the final. Up Wicklow!

It’s been a while since we put together one of our ‘In Numbers’ pieces, so we thought it was about time that we reflected on what we have been getting up to since our last one that we posted on November 5th!

In short, our blog has the following:

1. 369 blogposts, with 27,088 pageviews! Wow!

2. A whopping 1,413 comments at the time of writing!

3. 78 podcasts that have been played 1,838 times!

To add to that, our twitter has…

1. 1,758 tweets.

2. 365 followers.

In the 19 weeks since that last post, we have added to the many activities and projects that are typical of the St. Peter’s school year. Well done to all of our classes for all of their work so far this year.

Click on each number and sentence to read more about these great activities!

1. We now have one super cool, fun website that all of our students contributed to. Check it out here!

2. We have many friends in other schools, but two of the very best friends that could be are our Polly and her friend Brigid from St. Brigid’s in Greystones. Check out Codie’s lovely video about them here!

3. Polly sent 2nd Class THREE postcards from Greystones! 

4. The number of legs that our very furry and lovely spring visitor had!

5. The number of days in the brilliant Bray St. Patrick’s Festival. We blogged about it here!

6. 2nd Class are onto their 6th book of the year. Have you listened to their latest book podcast?

6. Another number 6… a 6 minute YouTube video where 5th Class interviewed the wonderful Manny Man who made a video about Irish History that went viral late last year!

7. The number of stands at our recent Book Fair… read all about it here!

9. The number of Creative Schools projects currently underway in our school!

10. The number of  scientific study examples that 5th Class presented online after their STEM Electricity lesson.

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You may have noticed our jaw-dropping ‘in numbers‘ piece on the blog – well, unsurprisingly, there were too many numbers associated with Mathletes and Khan Academy to choose from so we gave them a post of their own!

As we explained in a previous post, 5th and 6th classes are taking part in Mathletes at the moment. At this stage, the competition is in full swing and the students are really enjoying it, but even more importantly, they’re putting in huge effort into improving their Maths! So how have we been getting on? See for yourself!

• 3 – We’re currently in 3rd place in the overall leaderboards and the average mastery points per student. We’re also the top school in Leinster in both leaderboards!

• 1,578,433 – the number of energy points earned by 5th and 6th class. Energy points show how hard the student is working by practising exercises and watching videos. Over a million energy points is an amazing achievement!
• 9,988 minutes – the number of minutes 5th and 6th class have spent on Khan Academy so far working on their maths. That’s over 166 hours!
• 1264 Mastery Points – you can earn Mastery Points by getting questions correct about a particular topic. We’ve noticed that our students have started to earn Mastery Points in topics both on and off the curriculum, which is really helping their numeracy skills!
• 169 – the number of Mastery Points combined, earned by the Grefaldeo brothers
• 93 – the most Mastery Points earned by a student – Sam Smith! (Followed closely by Leon with 90!)
• 790 – the most minutes by a student on Khan Academy. Alan we salute your dedication!
• 200 – the answer to last week’s weekly challenge – we got it right!

So, there you have it! We’re really proud of all the hard work put in by our students and we think the numbers speak for themselves. We’re delighted that Mathletes and Khan Academy have captured the imagination and the interest of our students and we can’t wait to see what they get up to next!

Well done to all of the children who took part in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade on Monday.

Two of the staff from St. Peter’s were spotted in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade too. They were raising awareness for The Pieta House – ‘Darkness into Light’ walk taking place in Bray on the 10^th May. Darkness into Light is a fundraising 5km walk/run in aid of Pieta House, the suicide and self-harm crisis centre. The event will take place in over 40 venues in Ireland. The walk starts at 4.15am the 10^th of May from Bray Seafront and the route will go up through the Town, and will finish back on the Seafront just as dawn is breaking. This walk will help raise funds and awareness for a worthy cause, Pieta House, who have been helping people in distress over the last eight years.

Celebrate Life, and register for Darkness into Light today!

Welcome to our second-last post in Helping with Homework mini-series. All of the posts in the mini-series can be found on the website here. In previous posts, we discussed the difference between helping younger students with homework and helping older students. Today, we’re going to focus on study skills and revision for students in the older classes, particularly as they move towards secondary school. It can be difficult to juggle homework in different subjects and also to revise for exams and class tests. We have 5 simple tips so that you can help your child to cope with study skills.

1. Space: It’s vital to have a set space associated with homework and revision. It should be relatively distraction free – no TVs on, no radios blaring and no laptops, tablets or phones that aren’t needed for research. There’s plenty of argument over whether listening to music helps or hinders your child’s homework. As a general rule, it seems not to help and can often hinder, but it depends entirely on the individual. If your child is struggling with homework and exams, it might be something to re-examine.

2. Homework: Some subjects will have nightly homework, other subjects will only set homework once or twice a week, while others might set certain tasks for the next week. Try to encourage your child to spread out their homework evenly, and to keep on top of assignments. We all have last minute problems – a visitor, an unexpected outing or even something like a headache or cold – but at least if most of the preparation work has been done, it takes away most of the panic. For the first few months of secondary school, you may need to ask to see your child’s homework journal and help them to work out when to do their assignments.

3. Timetable: When your child is planning their timetable, encourage consistency. A little revision regularly is much more effective than cramming in the days and weeks coming up to exams. Revision is a particular skill. It’s important that your child has a goal sitting down and lists it. ‘I’m going to revise Geography for an hour’ is not an effective goal because your child can revise any part of Geography and have achieved their goal without putting too much effort in. ‘I’m going to revise Chapter 8 in my Geography Book and be able to answer the questions at the end of the chapter’ is a much more effective goal because your child can tell you at then end of the revision session whether or not they’ve achieved their goal.

4. Concentration: The average student loses concentration after around 40 minutes (as do adults!) One of the best study tips I got was to set a timer for 40 minutes and then to take a short break. If your child has huge amounts of homework, encourage them to move onto another subject after 40 minutes and to finish that particular subject later. It’s a lot easier to have 40 minutes of 5 subjects and to finish them off, than to have 2 subjects finished perfectly and 3 to start.

5. Breaks: Breaks are really important but they should be short and screen-free, which are definitely linked. A five-minute break feels too short if you only fit in five minutes of your favourite TV programme and then have to leave it again. Youtube and Facebook are notorious time-stealers – way leads onto way and suddenly an hour has passed!

Above all else, find out what works for your child! This is our last post in the mini-series on helping with homework, but we’d love to add to our posts with your tips and suggestions, so please let us know in the comments!

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

‘Maths for Fun’ is back in St. Peter’s! ‘Maths for Fun’ is a Home/School initiative where parents come into the classroom to work with the children playing different maths games. Every ten minutes the children move to a different station and play a new game. There are a variety of maths games such as maths bingo, interactive games on the laptops, tangrams, fraction games, What Time is it Mr Wolf?, etc. The games mean the children are practising their maths skills while also having fun.

Many thanks to Claire, Noeleen and Elaine who organised and implemented ‘Maths for Fun’ this week. The children really enjoyed it and we are looking forward to next week already!

5th class recently took part in the Bord Gáis Energy Student Theatre Awards. The challenge was to write a short play on the theme of Friendship. It was a great opportunity to write in a new format.

Today’s scene comes from Johnny, who wrote a play about two teachers in the staffroom. It’s a play about friendship between the principal and the teacher – but who’s the most important friend to have? Johnny’s actors were Oisín and AaronG.

We intended on recording Leon’s comedy today about Red, Ed and Fred, but as you can guess from the names, things got too confusing. We hope to record it tomorrow instead!

3^rd Class have been learning the song ‘My Hat Has Three Corners’. The song was written about a particular style of hat that had three corners. The melody was composed by a German composer called Franz Schubert. It is an action song that gets progressively harder as we had to leave our certain words in each verse and replace it with actions. Here is a short video of Szymon, Finn and Chris trying the action song for themselves. Well done boys!

IMG 0022[1] from St Peter’s, Bray on Vimeo.