St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

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... 

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!      

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... 

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!  

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... 

Slightly delayed St Peter’s Post this weekend! You can blame the CESI (Computers in Education Society of Ireland) Conference in Galway yesterday. The theme was ‘Spark the Imagination’ and they really did! We’ve come back with lots of very cool ways to enhance ICT in St Peter’s! The headlines from this week are: Check out 2nd class and their fantastic version of Riverdance here. It’s the annual Book Fair starting tomorrow (Monday)! Get all the details from Ms Sugrue or check out this post. In related news, we started a countdown to World Book Day. Count it down... 

This Wednesday, we kick off a series on helping your child with homework. Our series is going to give you a number of simple tips to help you to help your child with all aspects of their homework. We want to know what works for you and what you’d like advice on. We’d love to hear from you! To get us started, we brainstormed our best homework tips at a staff meeting earlier this week. We hope this post will be edited regularly, as we get more and more tips and advice! Here’s the structure of our mini-series: Week 1 (today): General tips and links Week 2: How to help your child... 

Hold onto your hats – we’ve a flood of posts for you this week! It may have been a slow traffic week on the roads, but it certainly hasn’t been on the blog. We think it might be the busiest week yet. We can credit it to two big events – Engineer’s Week 2014 and the blog birthday! Let’s get started with our Saturday supplement on Engineer’s Week: The week kicked off with a Wordle from 5th class about what we associate with Engineering. We then updated it on Friday to see what we learned during the week. See both Wordles here! 5th class then learned about... 

One year ago, today, St Peter’s published its first blog post. This is our 289th post in that year and as we announced yesterday, Aaron Gray posted our 1000th comment this week. With this in mind, we postponed this week’s ‘Wednesday for Parents’ to coincide with the birthday, so that we could focus on a very special topic – the blog. So, why do we blog? And why do we believe it’s worth it? We asked the people who know best, our students! I like blogging because it’s really fun and you can see what’s going on in the school – Johnny I like when... 

This week our blog turns 1 year old. We have achieved a lot in a short amount of time. One of the nicest things that has come from us blogging is that we now have students commenting on the blog every day, at home and in school. We also see our parents, families and the community checking out what we are getting up to and they leave us lovely comments too! We were so excited and looking forward to reaching the 1,000th comment on the blog. This great moment happened last night when Aaron Gray in 5th Class commented on the Winter Olympics post. Well done to Aaron, and congratulations to everyone...