St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

As you all know, Polly came back from her holidays last week. She had visited our friends in St. Brigid’s in Greystones! When she arrived back, she brought her friend Bridget the Bee! Bridget has come on her holidays to us now! She is having a great time. We wanted to let people know what they are getting up to, so Codie and his helpers followed Polly and Bridget around the school to catch up on their goings-on!

Polly showed Brigid around the library and the computer room. They even climbed onto our model dinosaur! They helped to serve coco during lunch and played the bongos for 2nd class! Brigid met our wonderful principal Ms. Whyte too.

We love having Brigid to stay. We think she will be heading off tomorrow, as she wants to spend St. Patrick’s Day in Greystones!

Our ‘Wednesday for Parents’ mini-series on helping with homework continues this week with advice on helping your child with their reading homework. During World Book Day, we found this statistic that really helps to emphasise how important your child’s reading homework is:

source

So how can you help with homework?

• In the senior end of the school, your child will generally not need you to ‘hear’ their reading every single day. However, it is important that you check that they understand what they’ve read. Ask them to tell you five things that they read (and make sure that they’re not from the same page!)
• In the junior end of the school, it’s really important that your child focuses on fluency. This means that it’s not enough for your child to be able to read every word by itself. It’s also important for them to read all the words smoothly as a sentence.
• It’s important that your child practises reading with expression. Encourage them to play around with silly voices for characters and ask them how a character might have said a certain piece of dialogue.
• Junior classes also use wordwalls to increase vocabulary. Read over each word (and mix up the order!) until your child can say it confidently. Your child should also try to use the word in a sentence to show you that they know what it means.
• For age-specific tips, check out Helpmykidlearn.ie for activities. We profiled helpmykidlearn.ie in a previous ‘Wednesday for Parents’ and a number of parents commented on how useful they found it. Reading activities for 5-7 year olds can be found here. Reading activities for 8-9 year olds can be found here. Reading activities for 10-12 year olds can be found here.

We use First Steps in St Peter’s and a main focus of ours is developing reading comprehension skills in the students. Here are sample questions for each skill so that you can help your child to practise, as they do their reading homework:

• Predicting: What do you think will happen next? What will that character do next?
• Making connections: Does this story remind you of another book/story in the newspaper/film/TV programme?
• Comparing: Are the two main characters alike or different? Why do you say that?
• Inferring: If you read between the lines, what do you think the author was trying to say in this chapter?
• Creating images: When you read this, what can you see/hear in your mind?
• Self-questioning: Encourage your child to formulate ‘I wonder’ statements – e.g. “I wonder does the author mean..’
• Summarising and paraphrasing: In your own words, what do you think the story was about?
• Skimming: Glancing through the text, what do you think this story is about?
• Scanning: Scanning through the piece, where do you think this story is set? Why?
• Determining importance: What is the main point of that paragraph?

And now, over to you! What are your tips for helping your child with their homework?

Today we were reviewing electricity. We started with Think-Pair-Share where we discussed what we already know about electricity – a good way of warming up our brains!

Next we examined a concept cartoon that Ms Sexton got at her STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths) course. We discussed what we thought about the cartoons and we generated questions and theories about it:

The switch turns the lamp on and off

It doesn’t matter where the switch is on the circuit because as long as there’s a power source and a bulb, they’ll light.

I don’t think that the small wire between the lightbulb and the switch needs to be there because it’s already connected.

Could you not just put the battery between the lightbulb and the switch? I don’t think you need as many wires as that.

I wonder if you could take out the battery and just light the bulb with the switch and the lightbulb.

I wonder if you could take out the switch and just have a small gap between the wires to see if the electricity would still pass through.

What would happen if you got a smaller battery that you could put into the switch and turn the switch into a power source?

Next we were given a set of drawings of circuits to assess. We filled in whether we thought the circuit would work or not and gave reasons why. In our Vines below, we predicted in our groups whether it would work by using Thumbs Up-Thumbs Down. We use Thumbs Up-Thumbs Down as formative assessment in class to show when we understand something (thumb up), when we’re not 100% sure (thumb across) or whether we’re completely lost (thumb down).  We then tested it with the materials we had on our desks.

After we tested each example, we discussed what we had observed and what we could infer and conclude from the observations.

Example 1:

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2nd Class just LOVE learning poems. Today we had great fun looking back on all of the poems we have learned this year. We like funny poems that we can entertain people with. Poetry helps with our reading and our speaking. It is also a challenge to remember all of the lines.

This year we have had fun with Limericks, learned scary Halloween poems and got into the festive spirit with Christmas poems too. 

Our latest poem is called ‘Oh, I Wish I’d Looked After Me Teeth!’ and it was written by Pam Ayres. You can hear her read the poem here!

Even better still, listen to our recording below.

ps. Make sure you brush your teeth tonight! Dylan M got great advice on twitter today.

@StPetersBray is it bad that our teacher remembers that poem!!!…and worse she kinda wishes she learned the moral of it!!!! 😉

— Cloghans Hill NS (@ScoilAnClochain) March 12, 2014

@StPetersBray I do 😉 And I’m a very bossy mammy now when it comes to teeth brushing…do you use a timer to make sure you do your 2 mins?

— Cloghans Hill NS (@ScoilAnClochain) March 12, 2014

Another blog post from the Fourth Class Vault, this time from last week. Enjoy!

Hello bloggers around the world, today we got our 101st green in our attendance chart! We were very excited when we got our hundredth green yesterday. We are now only 31 greens away from drawing with last year’s total of 132 greens.

We have got 8 prizes so far for our attendance. Mr. Foley put up eight gold stars on our one hundredth green representing all of our prizes so far. There is also a golden ring around it too.

To get a prize we have to get 10 greens in a row. If we get an orange or a red, we have to get 20 altogether.

We have been trying very hard to be on the top of the school attendance chart every month. We were a little disappointed when we got our oranges and red but we  only have 8 oranges and 1 red on our attendance chart.

By Stephen, Carl, Dylan W, Tommy, Jack B, Alex, Mason, Calvin, Dylan M

From our vault, a previously unpublished post from the boys in  Fourth Class, with pictures to follow. Enjoy!

Welcome bloggers.  Today in our class Calvin brought in two special visitors, his two pet turtles called Zig and Zag. Zig was the bigger one and Zag was the smaller one. We put them into a bowl of water. Zag floated at the top of the water and Zig sank to the bottom. Zig swam fast under the water.

Calvin told us that “Zig prefers water and Zag hates water. He prefers land.” Zig even tried to swim in a tiny puddle of water in his container. We learned that turtles have tails. We noticed when Zag was in the water that his tail went up in the air.

Calvin also told us that “they eat little pellets that dissolve in the water”. He has to feed them about seven or eight pellets every night. He looks after them on his own.

We put Zig and Zag in a race between our Maths books. They climbed on top of each other instead of racing! Calvin told us that the turtles try and escape from the container.

We took photos of Zig and Zag. Some of us, including Mr. Foley, got to hold them. When Mr. Foley was holding them he said they felt weird when they crawled on his skin. We washed our hands afterwards.

We were very excited to see Zig and Zag. We’ll give the last word to Calvin – “Hope you had fun reading this, and I hope you get a turtle for Christmas!”.

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

Recently, 5th class took part in the Bord Gais Energy Student Theatre Awards. We already recorded plays from Luke and Andy here. Today, we have scenes from AaronJ and Ameesh.

Aaron’s play is about two boys in a park – both wanting to make friends, but too awkward to start the conversation. His actors were Alan and Johnny.

Ameesh’s play is about making friends with a new neighbour. His actors are Ben and Sam.

Well done to the writers and to the actors!

Excitement is building for the launch of our brand new website at www.stpetersbray.ie!

Rumour has it that the St. Peter’s internet elves are working flat-out to deliver a brand new website before the week is out.

Stay tuned for more information to be posted later this week!

Last month, 5th class learned all about Picasso. They drew portraits using unusual shapes and proportion. They then coloured in their drawings using all the colours of the rainbow! Check out their beautiful work below:

2nd Class are reading Zac Power, Frozen Fear. It is a really adventurous book with lots of twists and turns! We are trying to get better at remembering every detail in the books we read. We decided to do lots of mini podcasts about this book as we work through it. This should help us with our homework.

Remember, so far this year we have been working on 1. Predicting, 2. Making connections, 3. Creating images, 4. Inferring, 5. Putting it all together. Now we are working on re-reading!

Have a listen to our podcast to keep up with Zac Power, Frozen Fear!

Remember, you can catch our previous 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