St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

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 goes. It’s a really enjoyable activity and it’s an ideal activity for your child to work on alone or with an adult!

Thanks to Mags Amond who showed us this link. We follow Mags on Twitter here! She always has great suggestions and links for ICT!

Try out the activity above and let us know how you got on!

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 and for smartphone apps that could help. There’s also an option on the website to sign up for monthly tips and ideas to help your child learn.

If you have concerns about your child in a particular area, although you are always welcome to talk to his/her class teacher or to Ms Sugrue or Mr Kinsella, this is an alternative support!

The website is based on the  ‘Literacy and Numeracy for Learning and Life’ (Department of Education and Skills 2011). This strategy tries to improve literacy and numeracy among young people, by linking schools, parents and communities to help children’s learning. You can read more about the strategy here.

Above everything else, the website emphasises that you know your child better than anyone else and that every child has different needs. What do you think? What activities work well with your child?

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 people hear them.

Click on the podcast below to hear our class interview. Hope you enjoy our podcast!

By Jack J, Tommy, Dylan W, Alex, Dylan M, Calvin, Jack B, Abhishek, and Mason.

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 parents:

In the Roots of Empathy program, a parent and baby (who is two to four months old at the start of the program) from the community visit a classroom nine times over the course of a school year. A trained Roots of Empathy instructor visits with the family to guide children as they observe the relationship between the baby and its parent. The instructor also visits before and after each family visit to reinforce teachings. There are 27 classroom visits in total in a Roots of Empathy program.

In the program, the baby is the “Teacher.” With each family visit, the instructor leads the children in noticing how the baby is growing and changing over the course of his or her first year of life. The children also watch the loving relationship between the parent and baby and see how the parent responds to the baby’s emotions and meets the baby’s needs. The attachment relationship between a baby and a parent is an ideal model of empathy.

Children learn to understand the perspective of the baby and label the baby’s feelings, and then are guided in extending this learning outwards so they have a better understanding of their own feelings and the feelings of others. This emotional literacy lays the foundation for more safe and caring classrooms, where children are “Changers.” They are more socially and emotionally competent and much more likely to challenge cruelty and injustice.

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 in the process of making such a long film and in Manny Man’s next project.

Oisín then drew little characters as if they were asking our questions. Here they are:

We were over the moon when John contacted us to let us know that he was planning a video response. Technology and social media has helped us to interview someone at the other end of the country! We’re very grateful to John for taking the time to answer our questions – his video session is fascinating and gives us a real sense of how he made his famous video. We’re going to follow the adventures of Manny Man with interest!

CLICK ABOVE TO HEAR A MESSAGE FROM SANTA PADDY!

2nd and 3rd Class have been really busy making lanterns for the turning on of the Christmas lights at the Civic Plaza at 4.30pm  this Saturday, the 23rd.

We all hope you will go and support our town. We can’t wait to see Santa and the lights, it is going be magic! Our local Bray Chamber have given us safe tealights so we can use our paper lanterns. There will be a raffle to see which person who comes with a lantern will get to switch on the lights with Santa. HO HO HO and see you there!

From 2nd Class!

ps. Remember Santa is always watching you!

We’re delighted to welcome Nugget back to St Peter’s! He’s like a new chicken after his long overdue bath. He’s a bit of a blast from the past for our past pupils!

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This week has been Science Week around the country! In St Peter’s, we’re famous for our involvement in scientific activities and events, and this week was no exception. 4th, 5th and 6th were busy with their projects for the Mini-Scientist, and other classes got stuck in with a variety of enjoyable activities!

Here are the headlines for this week:

• The MakeyMakey board video was a massive success this week – see what all the fuss is about here!
• 2nd class had a great week for Science Week – read all about it here
• Well done to Patryk in 6th who collected his prize for his superb entry in the Bray Lions Peace Poster competition.
• The answer was blue! Did you work out the question? Read about 4th class’s new display here
• 5th class planted bulbs for the springtime – watch their Animoto here. (more…)

Today in 6th class we were working on our Mini-Scientist project. We were planning out our experiments on our report book template. We wrote down what we knew about our projects and did research to find out more information. We created a podcast using Soundcloud and spoke about our project. Ian Lawless interviewed the lot of us.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/120094009″ width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

By Patryk, Ian, Jordan, Jamie and Archie.

The Bray Lions Club and The Paws Project held another peace poster competition. There were around two-hundred and forty entrants. I was really lucky to be chosen as one of the ten winners. Last night, myself, my Dad and Ms. Whyte went up to St. Cronan’s B.N.S. to collect my prize. My Dad and Ms. Whyte were really proud of me. It was a great night and my Dad bought me a tub of ice-cream and Pringles to celebrate!

By Patryk Ostapczuk

The Peter’s staff and student body would like to congratulate Patryk on such a fantastic achievement. A special word of thanks to Ms. Whyte, Patryk’s teacher!

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