St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

The dates for celebration for our school sacraments in 2014 will be as follows.

1. First Confession – Tuesday, 20th of May.

2. First Communion – Sunday, 25th of May.

3. Confirmation – Saturday, 17th of May.

Did you know that there’s not just one type of engineering? Just like a doctor can specialise as a GP or a surgeon, the career of an engineer can be very specialised too!

Today, we learned about the different disciplines of engineering here on the Steps website.

We each chose a different area of engineering that we would be interested in. Well done to Alan for leading today’s podcast! What area of engineering would you be interested in?

Welcome to another edition of the St Peter’s Post. This week was full of Write-A-Book projects and parent-teacher meetings. We had fantastic attendance at our meetings this week and it was a fantastic opportunity to discuss the students’ progress. Write-A-Book was a great success and we were delighted to submit over 70 books for reading in other schools. Congratulations to all the boys and girls who took part!

This week’s headlines:

• We’ve new additions to the Project Room – two terrapins. Read Codie’s blog post on them here.

We are trying to think of names for them! They will live in the project room. We want to call them Esio and Trot! pic.twitter.com/NhHwfkSi9b

— St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) February 3, 2014

• Second class have continued to publish their Write-A-Book stories on the blog using Storybird. You can read them here, here and here.

• Last week, 5th and 6th class took part in the school round of the Easons Spelling Bee. Read the report from Ian from 6th class, our winner, here. Ian now goes forward to the Regional Final in a few weeks.

• Ever wonder how we use podcasting to help our reading? Read Ms Brennan’s explanation here.

• If you haven’t seen it yet, you have to check out Tommy’s AMAZING stop-motion animation. Tommy’s in 4th class and he’s extremely talented! Watch his film here.

• Wondering why the snow on the blog is back? It’s to mark the start of the Winter Olympics. Read all about it here.

• Roots of Empathy continues and you can listen to the latest podcast here. We were also delighted to welcome Joan Daly-Martin to the school this week. She left lovely comments on our Roots of Empathy posts. Thanks Joan!

• Wednesday for Parents dealt with the hot topic (or more appropriately, the cold, wet and windy topic) of the weather. Read some great suggestions for weather experiments that can be carried out at home here.

In other news this week:

• Swimming started this week and our 2nd, 3rd and 4th classes really enjoyed.

• Lots of important notes went home this week. One was the uniform questionnaire, another was related to our application to become a Digital School of Excellence and another was sharing exciting news about the future of the school. Let us know if they didn’t reach home and we can send you out a copy of any of them!

• This is what our Student Council got up to this week. You can find the link to the Blockly tutorials here.

Our Student Council are working using Blockly to improve our problem solving in programming! We’re working in teams. pic.twitter.com/iCbBTNkpNg

— St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) February 5, 2014

• We’ve been using News2day to improve our note-taking and knowledge about the world around us.

Next week sees St Peter’s celebrate a very special birthday! Keep an eye on the blog during the week to find out more.

As always, you can catch up with previous editions of the Peter’s Post here.

It is lovely when students let us know about some of the amazing and creative things that they like to do in their spare time at home.

We were absolutely delighted when Tommy Lang in 4th Class filled us in on the stop-motion animation videos that he like to make at home on his Nintendo 2DS.

We were all looking forward to the new Lego movie coming out – now we’re thinking that we don’t need to see it as we have Tommy’s brilliant movie that is just incredible to watch.

Well done Tommy, we’re so proud of you. Make sure you have a look and let him know what you think of his video in the comments section!

Tommy’s Stop Motion Lego Video from St Peter’s, Bray on Vimeo.

On Friday the 31st of January, 2014, 5th and 6th class took part in the first St Peter’s Spelling Bee. The competition involved getting a word from the easy list in the first round, the medium list in the second round and the hard list in the final round. Whenever we spelled one of our words wrong, we were out. We could get the word in a sentence to help us, and in the final round, we could also get the definition. The last two left standing was Jamie from 6th, and me. We were trying to win at the knockout stages for about 15 minutes. In the end, I won. I am going to the Regional Finals next!

By Ian Lawless, 6th class.

The Easons Spelling Bee is run with Tubridy on 2fm. You can read our information post here

.

St. Peter’s has new turtles! They are called terrapins. We have named them Gordon and Douglas. We feed them prawns and they chase them in the water to catch them in their mouth. Gordon has a tail and Douglas doesn’t. They live in the Project Room. Thanks to Paddy for getting them. We’ll look after them well!

You might be wondering why the snow is back on the blog… here in St. Peter’s we’ve decided to get behind our Winter Olympic Wonders, the wonderful people competing for Ireland in the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia! We live in the town of one of the greatest Irish Olympians, so it is just right that we are aware of  the talents of our Winter Olympic stars.

The Winter Olympics have lots of cool (excuse the pun!) sports that you may have never even heard about! You can find out about all of the sports here – now is the time to watch sports that you have only ever tried out on your wii!

Here are the details about the Irish competitors.

We have:

1. Jan Rossiter in Cross-Country Skiing.

2. Sean Greenwood in the Skeleton.

3. Conor Lyne in Alpine Skiing.

4. Florence Bell in Alpine Skiing.

5. Seamus O’Connor in Snowboarding.

Check out the highlights from the games every evening on RTE News Now, which you can also watch online.

‘I’m freezing!’

‘It’s miserable out there today.’

‘Is it ever going to stop raining?’

In Ireland, we’re all a bit weather-obsessed, but this Winter has taken things to a new level! This week, we’ve decided to embrace the obsession and to make it the focus for ‘Wednesday for Parents’. We give you a number of suggestions that are perfect to learn a bit more about how the weather works! To help out, we’ve included a list of what you’d need to carry out the experiment.

• Make your own frost with this experiment. You’ll need a clean, empty tin, ice, salt and water.
• This post tells you how to make your own thermometer. You’ll need an empty glass bottle, water, rubbing alcohol, food colouring, a clear straw, Plasticine and a marker.
• Why do we put salt on the paths when it’s icy? Find out with this experiment. You’ll need food colouring, different types of salt and ice.
• Make a tornado and rain clouds with this post. For the tornado, you’ll need 2 one-litre bottles, a metal washer that fits closely to the top of the bottle, duct tape and glitter. For the rain clouds, you’ll need shaving cream, a bottle, food colouring and a small container to drop water from.]
• This is a simpler version of the tornado experiment, using a jar, washing up liquid (dish soap) and water!
• This post tells you how to make a balloon barometer. You’ll need a scissors, a 12 inch balloon, a large mayonnaise jar, a wide rubber band, sellotape, a needle or a straight pin, a plastic straw, glue, cardboard and a pencil/pen.

There are lots of other experiments and activities out there that are worth checking out! Let us know how you get on with the experiments above and which ones you’d recommend, in the comments.

It’s cold out, isn’t it? 🙂