St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

Welcome to another edition of the St Peter’s Post – our online weekly newsletter, where you can catch up on all of the week’s events! This week was filled with the #antearrach Twitter project, pancakes and lots of Polly adventures. Let’s get started!

The headlines from this week:

• First, we want to congratulate Ian from 6th class who came fourth in the county final of the Easons Spelling Bee. Read all about his great achievement here.
• The #antearrach Twitter project was in full swing this week. Check out the round up post, including a great podcast from 2nd class, here.
• Also as part of the #antearrach project, Ms Mitchell’s class went on a nature walk this week – check out their post here.
• Finally, we had a special guest in as part of the #antearrach project – meet Oreo here.

• Tuesday was a delicious day in St. Peter’s – it was pancake Tuesday! Read all about it here.

• Scríobh rang a 5 blagiontráil faoi pancóga. Léigh é ann.

• Ms Mitchell’s class also wrote a blog post here about their Pancake Tuesday.

• Tommy had another fantastic stop motion animation this week – set in an airport – with SOUND EFFECTS! We loved it, as you can tell by all the comments, and so will you – check it out here!

• Cathal from 3rd and Robert from 5th also made their own fantastic stop motion films this week. We’re so delighted to showcase amazing work like this from home. Check them out here.

• Another big event this week was World Book Day. We celebrated it with our book fair, organised by Ms Sugrue. Read all about it here.

• 5th class podcasted their favourite extracts from ‘Matilda’ for World Book Day here and were delighted to get a great response from Roald Dahl HQ – thanks Summer Buzz!

@SummerBuzz @StPetersBray @WBDIreland Oh, wonderful! Thank you St Peters Primary for making our day at #RoaldDahl HQ!

— Roald Dahl HQ (@roald_dahl) March 6, 2014

• 2nd class also presented their final set of ‘Write-A-Book’ projects to celebrate the week that was in it. Read them here.
• Wondering how Paddy’s pet terrapins are doing? Find out here.
• 2nd class were thrilled when Polly came back from Greystones this week. We reckon she’ll sleep all weekend after all of her adventures. Want to find out more about her trip? Read all about it here. (P.S. all the lovely Twitter interaction about Polly this week is well worth a read – we storified the Tweets here)
• 5th and 6th classes have been working on Khan Academy to improve their Maths. We put together a post explaining what a success it’s been here. And we’re delighted to announce that we’re currently in 4th place in the national standings of Mathletes:

•  5th class also had a busy working on their STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) this week. First they started off by working on their observing and inferring…
• And then on Friday, they turned into paleontologists. Check out that lesson here.
• Also this week, we had a multi-sports soccer blitz – read the report here.
• Archie from 6th showed off a cool trick he learned with static electricity – watch it here.
• Check out 2nd class’s work with NewsBooth this week. Their news report on the Titanic has to be seen!
• Our ‘Wednesday for Parents’ mini-series on help with homework continued this week. Tips for helping with your child’s learning homework can be found here.

What a variety of posts this week! In other news:

• Here’s the chirpstory of Signs of Spring from Seomra Ranga – can you find our contributions?
• We went to Mass on Wednesday for Ash Wednesday. We were really proud of how well-behaved and respectful all of our students were.
• Leon, Patryk and Adam updated our Shelfari for us with reading suggestions for Matilda.]
• TeachMeet East took place during the week. You can read more about it here. St Peter’s was well-represented on the night with presentations on Roots of Empathy, podcasting and Mini-Scientist. Well done to Ms Brennan who helped to organise a really successful evening!

Next week is the lead-up to St Patrick’s Day and Seachtain na Gaeilge!

As always, you can read all previous editions of the St Peter’s Post here.

There were lots of puzzled faces during our lesson about working as a scientist today, following on from our lesson on observation and inference earlier in the week. 

Scientists have to think creatively and also have to work with the evidence, even when they don’t have all the information that they’d like to have. Today, we adapted this lesson to encourage creative thinking, working together and changing theories when new evidence emerges! Again, we have the STEM course that Ms Sexton is attending to thank for the idea!

We used Vine as it’s a great way to record short video clips and we used News Booth, which made its debut on the blog earlier in the week with Ms Brennan’s class!

For this lesson, we needed five identical sets of 21 laminated ‘fossils’ in an envelope. Each group of two or three students got an envelope each and a number of sheets of A4 paper.

As you all know by now, we’re delighted to have been approved for extension work to the school, to facilitate all of our lovely new students (and our lovely old ones too!) Our story is set in the future, during the extension work to St Peter’s…

When digging out the back yard, one of the builders found a strange looking bone. “We have to find out what this is!” said Ms Whyte, “I wonder if some of the older classes would help?” Your class was the first to sign up and on the first morning set to work. Your team found three bones on that first morning. You went back to camp to try to work out what they could be.

Each group could take three random bones from their envelope at this point (without peeking) and try to decide what type of skeleton they had. One group got a jawbone and decided from the sharp teeth that their creature must be a carnivore. Here’s a Vine showing the combinations made up by the groups after the first three bones:
(more…)

Tommy has started a new trend for film-making. Cathal from 3rd class and Robert from 5th class are showcasing their excellent stop-motion films made at home today! They used Lego and a stop-motion app to create two videos. They plan to make another one using Cathal’s crane over the weekend. We’re really impressed by our students’ creativity!

Stop motion R&C – 1 from St Peter’s, Bray on Vimeo.

Stop Motion – R&C – chapter 2 from St Peter’s, Bray on Vimeo.

Some of our 5th and 6th class boys went to play a soccer blitz at Wolfe Tone Football pitch today. We competed against some great teams from St. Kieran’s, St. Fergal’s and Bray School Project; every school entered two teams into the Blitz. Every team played three matches each. From St. Peter’s, Team 1 won one of their matches by 3 goals to nil and Team 2 won all three of their matches!
Davy Berry set up a fantastic goal against St. Kierans which Alan Duda executed perfectly!
Our trainer Paddy’s “superkeeper” Eduard had a clean sheet in every match, he never once conceded a goal!
During one of the other school’s matches, a dog ran out onto the pitch and tried to join in, it was hilarious! Luckily he did not score any goals!!

Top Goal Scorers were; Jordan (6) Kian (5) Jamie D (2) Ian (1) Kyle (1) Alan D (1) Sky (1)

We hope to win many more games against these schools this year… and maybe get some medals at the end of the year!

By, Luke Mc, Ameesh, Davy B, Alan D ( 5th Class)

Thanks to Ms. Sugrue for running a really successful book fair. Well done to all of the boys who helped her out in running the event. It was an excellent way to celebrate the week of World Book Day. Everyone got a chance to browse and buy, and it was a super way of checking out the work of some new authors.

We can’t wait for the 2015 Book Fair already!

Today at 1.30pm Oreo the Spring lamb came to visit our school.
Ben, Johnny,Jordan and Nathan O’B from Ms Mitchell’s Class got to hold the lamb and pet him too.
Oreo was very happy to see us all.
Jordan noticed that he had no teeth.
Johnny noticed that he had a black nose and was very soft to touch.
Ben thought he was very woolly and soft too.
Nathan got a very cuddly hug off Oreo, they became good friends!
Nathan missed Oreo a lot!

After seeing Oreo our class had a big chat about the kinds of farms sheep live on, where wool comes from, and where we get our yummy lamb dinners from too!

It’s no secret that we love Roald Dahl in St Peter’s. Roald Dahl Day was celebrated in great style by 2nd class at the start of the year, we choose a Roald Dahl fairytale for the school play every year and we even have Roald Dahl month every year. This year, Roald Dahl month fell in February and 5th class chose to read Matilda. Our chapter of Matilda every morning has become one of our favourite parts of the day and we’ve only one chapter left.

Roald Dahl loves language and word-play and we enjoyed reading his words aloud! To celebrate World Book Day, we all chose an extract from ‘Matilda’ and read it aloud. You can listen to both podcasts below! Well done to Ben, who led the podcast today.

Happy World Book Day! What’s your favourite book?

You might remember that in last term, we took part in the #anfomhar twitter project for autumn.  It is a collaborative project, organised by one of our favourite websites Seomra Ranga. We blogged about it here, here and here!

This week we took part in the #antearrach project. We shared all of the ‘signs of spring’ that we could find in school and our area. We got to learn from other schools and saw/heard/read about their #antearrach projects.

On Tuesday morning, 2nd Class made a podcast all about spring!

Afterwards, they went out for a nature walk! Here they are, exploring the area.

Meanwhile in Ms. Mitchell’s class Adam Hackman wrote a short piece about their nature walk on Tuesday. Adam said, “We saw buds growing on trees and some daffodils too. We saw bird’s nests at the very top of the trees. We heard some birds tweeting and chirping.  We saw moss on the ground too.” You can read more about Ms. Mitchell’s classes nature walk here.

On Wednesday, 2nd Class recorded another podcast. This time they looked back on all they had learned so far from their walk. They also spoke about their Science/Geography lessons this week, where they are learning about Life Cycles.

Have a listen!

On Thursday we completed our weekly Art lesson and it was all about spring too. We made daffodils, snowdrops, sheep, ladybirds and butterflies for the corridor display.

We had a great time with the #antearrach project. We hope you liked what we had to say and learned something from us. Thanks to our twitter and blogging friends who shared pictures and messages with us. Finally, thanks to Seomra Ranga for putting the whole project together!

This week, we continue our series on helping with homework by focusing on learning homework. Learning homework can be the hardest part of homework to do well because it’s not as measurable as written homework. A child can achieve the same amount of work in 3 minutes of focused learning homework one day, as he would on another day of an hour’s distracted learning!

Learning homework will usually take the form of four different types of learning:

• Spellings
• Tables
• Gaeilge
• General learning – maths vocab, dates in history etc.

Our tips include:

• Test your child by mixing up the vocab or maths facts. Can your child spell or say the answers when they’re out of order?
• Test your child by asking him or her to write it down. Can they say it and write it?
• Encourage your child to do their learning homework every day. The repetition of learning everyday will help your child to hold on to the knowledge. Five or ten minutes every day is much better than three hours in one night!
• On the same point, practise learning homework in the car, in the supermarket, waiting for the bus – tables are especially important to learn in this way. They really need to be second nature!
• We found this fantastic post from MerryBeau in St Brigid’s in Greystones, about the importance of learning tables. She has a number of excellent links and ways to learn tables.
• One way to learn vocabulary and spellings is to use ‘Look-Say-Cover-Write-Check’. Your child writes the tricky word, looks at it carefully and says it. Your child then covers the word and attempts to write it. They then check the spelling of the word. If the word is correct, the child can move on. If it’s incorrect, repeat the process. You can see an example of how it works on this website.

Most of all, experiment and find what works for you and your family. As we mentioned before, we intend this post to be a work in progress and we’d love to add what works for you! Let us know in the comments!

Let’s start with a picture that says it all! We consulted with parents a couple of weeks ago about homework online. On a number of occasions over the last week, 5th class have had the option of substituting a maths homework activity for 10 minutes of Khan Academy. On Tuesday evening, this happened:

The light grey represents time in school, while the dark grey represents time outside of school.  So what is Khan Academy? Let us explain! The Khan Academy is a free resource that allows anyone to take classes in Maths, English and Science. It suggests topics for you based on whatever topics you’ve already mastered.

We first got involved with Khan Academy was thanks to the Mathletes Challenge. Mathletes is an Irish challenge, running from February to May. It provides suggestions for weekly challenges and collates points into leaderboards. We only started last week so we haven’t featured on any leaderboards yet, but if the classes can keep up this level of effort, we’ll be surprised if we don’t make an appearance in some shape or form at some stage! 6th class started using their Khan Academy accounts today and we know that they’ll get stuck in too!

Khan Academy has been a huge hit so far. We’re delighted by how well the students are engaging with the content and the format. But don’t just take it from us – we’ll let the numbers do the talking.

Here are 5 numbers that show us that Khan Academy and Mathletes has been a success in St Peter’s so far!

3250 – the number of minutes spent working online on Khan Academy by 5th class so far.

191 – the average number of minutes spent by each of our students this week – much of it outside of school!

454,008 – the number of Energy Points earned by 5th class in their first week. Energy points show off how much effort has been put into learning a topic by students.

8 – the number of students who achieved more than 30,000 Energy Points this week.

380 – the number of mastery points earned by 5th class in their first week. Mastery points show how many topics the students are competent in.

Check back next week to see how we’re getting on!