St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

2nd Class were absolutely amazed yesterday when they got a very interesting tweet from an old St. Peter’s friend.  Why not hear all about the tweet and the visit that resulted afterwards? Meet our new friend Polly! Polly lands in 2nd Class! from St Peter’s, Bray on Vimeo.  

Congratulations to Leon from 5th class, who recently had a book review published by South Dublin Libraries! Leon is a superb reader, who always has one or two or seven books on the go. He’s also gifted with words and has an amazing vocabulary! We’re delighted to see him showcase his talents! You can read Leon’s review here! Leon reviewed John Boyne’s ‘Stay where you are and then leave’. The book was nominated for the Bord Gais Irish Book Awards in the ‘Senior Children’s Book of the Year’ category. You can read all about the Irish Book Awards... 

The Student Council would like to thank Ms Whyte for their new badges. Now everyone will know who are our representatives in our classes. Our badges look great! Well done to the current reps for all of their hard work so far this year!        

2FM and SuperValu are set to team up again with the St Vincent de Paul to help those who need it the most in our community this Christmas. The Toy Appeal has been a great success over the past 4 years. This year they have an even bigger goal and we want to help them to transform Christmas for thousands of families throughout the country. This year, St Peter’s have decided to get involved. We want to ensure that no auntie or uncle, granny or grandfather struggling financially has to personally suffer to give some simple presents this Christmas. There are several ways to get involved: Buy... 

A quiet week on the blog this week, but certainly not a quiet week in St Peter’s. We’ve lots coming up in the next few weeks and this week was definitely a preparation week – lots of singing, science and sketches. That’s not to say that we don’t have plenty of news for you – if you missed anything during the week, you’ve come to the right place! Here are the headlines from the week: The weeks started in the best possible way, with the return of everyone’s favourite chicken, Nugget. He mightn’t have been so excited to return if he was a turkey!... 

  http://learn.code.org/hoc/1 – here’s the link! One of our recent Scratch clubs with 2nd and 3rd classes focused on a tutorial, made for Computer Science Education Week (9th December – 15th December). It uses Blockly to introduce children to writing basic code. Blockly is quite similar to Scratch in many ways and the children adapted very quickly! We noticed that this tutorial was great for the children’s problem-solving skills, as they tested their code regularly and fixed it when it went wrong. It starts off at a very easy level and gets more challenging as it... 

  This Wednesday, we’re going to focus on just one website – Help My Kid Learn! Help My Kid Learn is a website by NALA (National Adult Literacy Agency) to help parents to develop their children’s learning at home. The activities are broken up into different age-groups. The activities fall under the categories of ‘Talk’, ‘Play’, ‘Read’, ‘Write’ and ‘Count’ and discusses how to approach the activity, why the activity is important and how to follow on from the activity. They also have suggestions for online activities... 

Hello bloggers, last week our class finished our third novel this year. It is called “Rover Saves Christmas” by Roddy Doyle. It is really funny. We did an interview about and recorded it as a podcast. We used soundcloud to record the podcast. We used the iPad to record our voices. We wrote questions in our English copy to see who had the best questions for the interview. Jack Barsoum interviewed the whole class (He did a great job! – Mr. Foley). Our voices seemed to sound different. This is because our voice vibrates through our skull so we don’t hear our voices like other... 

2nd Class are so excited. Today they started Roots of Empathy. We had a pre-family visit. Next week Baby T will visit us for the first time. Today we sat on our green mat and practiced how to behave at the mat. We talked about the things that we think baby will do next week. We guessed how big he will be. We also voted on a name for our baby doll who will help us to learn. The doll’s name is Fia. Finally, we learned a welcome and goodbye song for when Baby T comes to visit. We can’t wait for next week and will tell you all about it then.   This is Baby Fia Hard at work on our mat   For... 

In October, a video showing the history of Ireland in 6 minutes took the Internet by storm. We posted it here on our blog and 5th class were so impressed by it that we contacted John Ruddy, the maker of the video, to ask him if he’d do a quick Q&A on animation. We have a really exciting project coming up in the New Year related to Science and Animation, and Leon and Eduard already showed off their stop-motion skills as part of Culture Night here. John Ruddy kindly agreed to answer any questions and we started thinking about the questions we wanted to know about animation. We were interested...