St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

We were delighted to welcome Sue Wyatt, a teacher from Tasmania, and her pet Tasmanian Devil, Davo’ to St Peter’s this morning. Sue is the founder of the student blogging challenge and is good friends with our good friend, @merrybeau1 from St Brigid’s in Greystones, who put her in touch with us! We were thrilled to have her visit us this morning and we were really excited to tell her all about our experiences of blogging. As it was the Wicklow Sports Day, we had a group of 2nd, 5th and 6th classes in the library to talk to her.

First, we introduced ourselves and told Sue what we like about blogging.

Welcome to St Peter’s @tasteach! We’re talking all about blogging and Tasmania! pic.twitter.com/Vk4zsEoBau

— St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) June 4, 2014

Next, Sue told us about Tasmania and showed us Australian money. Did you know that Australian money is made from plastic?

Now we’re looking at the difference between Irish and Australian money! Australian notes are plastic! pic.twitter.com/nZhs6ylJOt — St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) June 4, 2014

She told us about native Australian animals and she even had a present for us! She had a platypus and an echidna with her, with two books about them. Polly was at Wicklow Sports today but we can’t wait to introduce them all tomorrow.

Check out our new friends thanks to @tasteach – do you know what type of animals they are? pic.twitter.com/pGWlYLC7Yp

— St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) June 4, 2014

We wanted to show Sue how we put together a podcast so Kelsey and Dylan recorded one about the Sports Day last week.  

We recorded a podcast about #sportsday to show @tasteach how we use Soundcloud! pic.twitter.com/NXFt3FdgSh — St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) June 4, 2014

Finally, we showed Sue our favourite posts on the blog. Can you guess which was the most popular? Click here to find it!

We’re showing @tasteach what we like about our blog! pic.twitter.com/pF0I7KeUaB

— St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) June 4, 2014

It was lovely to meet Sue and Davo and we hope they really enjoy the rest of their trip. This is the post Davo wrote about us and this is the one he wrote about their afternoon with St Brigid’s! We can’t wait to see how he gets on with our friends in Cloughfin!

Last Friday, there were quite a few doubtful faces turned to the sky, looking carefully at clouds patterns – it’s times like these we miss Mr Curran! After a very wet day on Thursday and an overcast start to Friday, there were a few worried faces in case it was too wet for Sports Day to go ahead. As it turned out, the sun was splitting the stones by mid-morning and we had a fantastic day! It was mainly thanks to Paddy, who put in so much work for Sports Day, as he always does!

We kept track of the day on Twitter, through photographs and Vines. Vine of the day has to go to Dylan Kane from 6th class for his high jump. Scroll down to see the others!

We made a Soundcloud today about our favourite part of Sports Day. Thanks Kelsey and Dylan M for recording the podcast!

(more…)

St. Peter’s Primary celebrated the First Holy Communion of our 2nd Class pupils on May 25th last. It was a lovely day and the sun shone for our 16 pupils and their families. It was the first time we celebrated First Holy Communion with girls in our school and it made the occasion all the more special!

Many thanks to the older pupils in the school who sung in the choir on the day, and congratulations again to our 2nd Class pupils! As always, we are very grateful for the support of Fr. James and Sr. Patricia and the local choir who helped the school to prepare for the day. Thanks also to Shell White for the lovely photos sent to us so that we could make this video! Enjoy reliving the great memories of the day.

Welcome to the St Peter’s Post – our weekly online newsletter! Apologies for the late edition this week – we were in Dublin Castle for the Excited Festival on Saturday, showcasing our work using technology in St Peter’s – expect a massive post later this week to celebrate our very special day out!

And so, to the main headlines of last week:

• We started the week with a really exciting post, all about our experience at the National Mathletes final last weekend! It was announced that we were the top primary school in Leinster, well done to 5th and 6th classes for all their hard work! Read all about our amazing day here.
• 3rd class had an amazing Monday morning – they received a big box of Lego from Bernard Kirk in Galway Education Centre. Read their brilliant post here.
• St Peter’s featured in the Bray People this week. Check out the photos here!
• We live-tweeted Mega-Assembly during the week and 4th class wrote letters to an old classmate – we Storified both and the blog post is a really cool way of catching up on all the big (and little) changes that have taken place in St Peter’s recently. Definitely worth a read here!
• Have you seen the twins??
• We had our sports day on Friday (again, blog post to follow) – check out our schedule here!
• 2nd class have been learning all about Irish myths and legends. They presented their first two stories in a really cool way. The Brown Bull of Cooley is here and the Giant from Scotland is here.
• ‘Wednesday for Parents’ this week suggested sites to promote awareness of money among children. Check it out here.

In other news this week:

• This week, we were really busy completing our standardised testing. Well done to all our students for their concentration and effort.
• We had a photographer in the school on Wednesday to take class and individual photos. It gave our students in 2nd and 6th classes a chance to dress up in their Communion and Confirmation clothes, which was particularly popular with our six girls:

High fashion in the library as we take our school pictures! Great memories! pic.twitter.com/rhYUa7gXo6

— St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) May 28, 2014

• Thanks to the ever-supportive Shell for sharing some photos of our Communion ceremony on Twitter:

The Super 2nd Class of @StPetersBray with their Wonderful Teacher Ms B Principal Ms Whyte & Deputy Principal Mr Foley pic.twitter.com/Duu7S8pVXm

— Shell..╰☆╮ (@Shell_White_) May 27, 2014

• Much of our Twitter feed on Saturday was full of the amazing day we had at Excited – we really recommend that you check it out, but we will be including it in our blog post during the week.
• As you know, we’re off today, but we’re cramming a lot into the rest of the week. Tomorrow (Wednesday) is the Wicklow Sports competition and we’re welcoming a very special visitor, Sue Wyatt from Tasmania, who’s coming to talk to us about how we blog!
• On Friday, it’s Bike Day! We’re also welcoming Anne McMorrough, who works with students who are training to become teachers, who wants to talk to us about creative learning using ICT. She spoke to our students at Excited on Saturday and she was really impressed by everything they were telling her.

As always, you can find all of our previous St Peter’s Posts here and now, on the website, we’ve included space for the St Peter’s Posts so that visitors to the website can keep up with all of our weekly news. You can access the latest St Peter’s Post at the bottom of the front page of the website or you can click on this link to see them all!

As you know, 2nd Class have been learning about Irish myths and legends. We decided to record podcasts and make videos to help us to remember the sequence of the stories. As always, we used Soundcloud for the podcast and Vintagio for the video!

This is the second post from us on this topic. It is called The Giant From Scotland We will have one more soon! It will be about The Children of Lir. If you want to read our last blog post about The Brown Bull of Cooley, click here!

We hope you like our video and podcast about The Giant from Sctoland and the story of where the Giant’s Causeway came from!

The Giant From Scotland from St Peter’s, Bray on Vimeo.

Enjoying last year’s High Jump!

Hi everyone! Paddy here. I’m really looking forward to tomorrow’s Sports Day. We really hope the weather will be great! Here is our plan for the day!

Sports day 2014

10:00 High Jump

Just like the Olympics. This is a great way to start sports day.

10:40Tag Bull dog

Each class will go up against their teacher and other members of staff!

11:00 Break time

11:20 Class and Parent challenge. There are 6 stations (including BBQ) where classes go around together and get a score at each station. The highest combined points total wins. This year we invite parents to join in with their child’s class to help them improve their score. All stations are target based with no running involved. The class with the highest combined score wins a prize.

The stations are:

BBQ

Basketball shot

Penalty shot

Golf put

Tennis shot

Hockey Shot

12:30Lunch

13:00 Obstacle course

The highlight of the St. Peter’s sports day where staff take a team of pupils through a tough demanding course. (Paddy’s team always wins!)

13:45 The new sports challenge

Classes will rotate around the school and get to play tag rugby, football and volleyball in head to head contests.

Enjoying the BBQ last year!

This week’s ‘Wednesday for Parents’ suggests websites to teach children about money management. Obviously the best training comes from managing pocket money and savings, but the two websites we’re going to show you tonight also give your child a sense of the challenges and struggles that come with managing money in real life.

The first website came to us from our great friend Ms Beauchamp from St Brigid’s in Greystones (@merrybeau1 on Twitter). She recommends Moneyville.ie, which seems to be more directed at the family setting with its section for parents here. Moneyville’s graphics are appealing and we can see how a child would enjoy the activities. Moneyville’s priorities are the four fundamentals of money management:

• Where does money come from?
• Prioritise money
• The value of money
• Savings

We think this one is worth a look – every month throws up an unexpected financial disaster (much like real life as MerryBeau points out!)

The second one was suggested by Seomra Ranga and is the Values, Money and Me website, which uses stories, interactive activities and calculators to encourage the child to think about earning money, budgeting and saving. Although the website is designed to be used in a school setting, we can see how parents could use it as a way of encouraging their child to discuss how they think about money! The activities are aimed for a variety of ages within the primary school curriculum and covers a variety of topics. It also discusses where the money comes from that pays for pensions, street lighting and schools – a good way to back you up when you say ‘money doesn’t grow on trees’!

As well as online resources, we’d love to hear your tips for helping your child to learn about money management in real life! Let us know in the comments.

As always, all ‘Wednesday for Parents’ posts can be found here.

Many of our tweets this afternoon fell under two hashtags and it made us reflect, during one of the busiest times of the year, on how much has happened. We thought we’d share it with you, particularly if you’re a past pupil and wondering what on earth has been going on in Peter’s lately!

When our now 4th class were in 2nd class, they had a boy in their class called Jack. Jack was really popular with staff and students and we were all a little bit heartbroken when he moved to Galway, though he keeps in touch every so often with postcards and last year, he came to visit us – which was so exciting! During the week, he sent us a postcard from Connemara:

4th Class received a lovely postcard today from a boy who used to be in their class! We miss you too Jack! pic.twitter.com/saxsKZNeEn

— St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) May 26, 2014

So 4th class decided to write him letters explaining everything that’s changed in the last two years! We Storified our Tweets to tell him (and you) all the news. (Don’t forget to scroll down to our second Storify of the post!)

Then this afternoon, we had what Mr Foley called a ‘Mega Assembly’ – there was a lot of news and a lot to celebrate!

(As so many of our parents/families have been asking about the twins, we’ve made this post a sticky for the week – don’t forget to scroll down to catch up on the rest of our news!)

Last Tuesday lunchtime, you could have been forgiven for thinking that a world-famous boy band or footballer had turned up at St Peter’s. There were cheers and students running across the yard to line up at the wall to greet our special guests! But it was better than having Messi or Niall Horan show up – we were all racing to see Ms Whyte, Mr Vance and Ari – and the two new arrivals – Millie and Ruby! Ms Whyte is on maternity leave after the birth of her two gorgeous daughters last month and we were so thrilled to see her. She’s been keeping in touch through Twitter and she got a fantastic reception from students and parents alike at the Confirmation and Communion ceremonies. She promised photos of the twins for the blog and here they are! Congratulations to Ms Whyte, Mr Vance and Ari on the two new arrivals to the family and we can’t wait to see more of them soon.

2nd Class have been learning about Irish myths and legends. We decided to record podcasts and make videos to help us to remember the sequence of the stories. As always we used Soundcloud for the podcast and Vintagio for the video!

This is the first post from us on this topic. We will have two more soon! They will be about other Irish myths and legends.

We hope you like our video and podcast about The Brown Bull of Cooley!

The Brown Bull of Cooley! from St Peter’s, Bray on Vimeo.