St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

Last Friday, we celebrated the annual St. Peter’s World Cup. It was incredible fun, and as per usual it was very, very tight at the finish.

It all started with the team draws. Every teacher had a team to manage! We shared the teams via twitter as they were announced at assembly.

Mr. Kinsella will manage Argentina! #PetersWC

— St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) June 20, 2014

Ms. Mitchell and Ms. Flanagan will manage France! #PetersWC — St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) June 20, 2014

Ms. Sexton is managing the Ivory Coast! #PetersWC

— St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) June 20, 2014

Ms. Brennan is going to manage Brazil! #PetersWC — St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) June 20, 2014

Tommy will manage Italy! #PetersWC

— St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) June 20, 2014

Mr. Staunton will manage Ghana! #PetersWC — St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) June 20, 2014

Paddy will manage Iran! #PetersWC

— St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) June 20, 2014

Ms. Byrne and Ms. Sugrue will manage Australia! #PetersWC — St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) June 20, 2014

The sun was shining and we were all set for a brilliant afternoon of football. Eventually we got down to the semi-finals. Brazil played France, and France  won thanks to a excellent goal by Dylan Hempenstall in 3rd Class! The other semi-final was contested by Ghana and Argentina. Ghana emerged victorious with an excellent whole-team performance. That left Ghana v. France in the final. It was VERY tense! Mr. Staunton made his debut performance on the line against a very confident Ms. Flanagan who was missing her sidekick Ms. Hyland. However, she had the strategic mind of Ms. Mitchell as her co-coach this year and she brought them great luck. After a very tight, close game…it ended in a draw! We had true World Cup drama on the cards! Have a look at some of the penalties…

In the end.. it came down to Eduard’s goal!

Thanks to Paddy and the coaches for another great day. Well done France! The next big sporting occasion is the Teachers v. Students Football Match! Bring it on!

Those on Twitter have been able to follow all of today’s developments as they’ve happened, but we’ve put together a little post to update you on the progress of Mr Foley, Mr Kinsella and Paddy at the 12 hour mark, half way through the challenge, and as you can see, they’ve reached 16 counties, half of the target. It’s going to be close tomorrow morning but we really hope they can manage it!

If you’d like to follow the journey on Twitter, you can either check out the school’s twitter account @StPetersBray or the hashtag for the challenge #32in24. You can read all about the Challenge here.

The day started with a trip to East Coast FM for an interview with Anne at 9am!

Great start to the morning with Anne in @eastcoastfm. Now time for a bit of breakfast before we set out! #32in24 pic.twitter.com/A2CPAHgSxw

— St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) June 22, 2014

Then, the three went for some breakfast and prepared to set off. They’re wearing t-shirts, made specially for the trip, with the counties and their sponsors on the back…  

All set….! #32in24pic.twitter.com/yWjHbVTMgn — St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) June 22, 2014

TheDailyEdge, part of TheJournal.ie, also published an article about the challenge and you can read that here.

There’s been fantastic support all day from the Twitter community and you can read all the updates from the three lads and the messages of good luck by clicking through to our Twitter profile or the hashtag. Keep up the great work Mr Foley, Mr Kinsella and Paddy – we’re really proud of you! Don’t forget that we’d really like to have all sponsorship money in tomorrow and that parents are welcome to join us for the homecoming breakfast at around 11am. Thanks for all the support so far!

Welcome to our weekly online newsletter, the St Peter’s Post! The big news this weekend is the 32 County Challenge that’s currently underway – Mr Foley, Paddy and Mr Kinsella are in Laois at the current time of writing (but hopefully will be further along by the time we finish)…

As they’ve just hit Carlow, we’ll press ahead with the headlines from the week:

• On Monday, we welcomed Alan Nolan, author of ‘Fintan’s Fifteen’ to St Peter’s for a workshop with 5th class. It went down a storm and the students had a fantastic time drawing Ollie and other characters. Read all about it here.
• One of our fifth class students had a review of ‘Fintan’s Fifteen’ published on Seomra Ranga this week, and three of his classmates took part in a podcast review of the book, also published on Seomra Ranga – check out the post here.
• We’d a brilliant guest post for ‘Wednesday for Parents’ this week from Summer Buzz, all about reading over the Summer. There are lots of brilliant tips in there and it turns the idea of reading lists on its head. We highly recommend reading it here.
• Well done to the students in Ms Mitchell’s class, who did really well in the INTO handwriting competition – read all about their great achievement here.
• 5th class are looking ahead to the summer holidays and chose their #bucketandspadelist – read all their suggestions here.

In other news this week:

• On Friday, we held our Peter’s World Cup – France, managed by Ms Flanagan and Ms Mitchell, won on penalties. This is Ms Flanagan’s second successful year in a row – we hear Martin O’Neill is quaking in his boots! We’ll have a post on the tournament on Monday!
• We had an Open Day on Thursday for our new students – we were delighted to welcome our incoming Junior Infants at 12.30 and the other classes at 3pm. The school was a hive of activity with the many new students for September, along with 31 current students, who stayed back to welcome and show the new students around! We’re so excited for September!

3rd (the new 4th) are showing their K’nex and Lego creations! pic.twitter.com/iGTrR2Oyab

— St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) June 19, 2014

• 2nd class had their final ‘Roots of Empathy’ session with Baby T this week.

Sincere thanks to Gwen and T for making our @RootsofEmpathy experience so memorable. Bye bye Baby T! #rootsofempathypic.twitter.com/YuYLVg4EtI — St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) June 18, 2014

• 4th class finished making their Stop-Motion films this week – we can’t wait to see them!

• 5th class are completely engrossed in their final class novel of the year – they’re really enjoying ‘A Little Piece of Ground’.

• Mr Curran is coming in to judge his handwriting competition this week. We’re really looking forward to seeing him!

• Don’t forget the Homecoming Breakfast for the 32 County Challenge! We’ve also extended the deadline for sponsorship – so make sure you remember yours tomorrow morning. Thanks to the many students and families who have been so generous! With only the photo collage left to put together, the lads have run into a spot of bother…

They said we couldn’t go wrong. They said the sat nav was fool proof! #32in24 pic.twitter.com/hdc3SUXgH2

— St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) June 22, 2014

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!

We chose to write a piece from Roald Dahl’s  “The Twits” because we have been reading it in class and love it!

We did not even do a practice piece, Ms. Mitchell entered our very first attempts for the competition.

It was so long ago that we entered, and we kept asking and asking if we had won anything yet, it was hard work waiting!

Finally this week, the good news arrived!

We could not believe it when Ms. Mitchell said that we had four winners in our class this year!

We are extremely proud of all of our classmates for entering and winning!

Each winner got a certificate and Ms. Mitchell gave her own prizes too.

The Winners are:

Nathan Kennedy, Johnny Moorehouse, Ben Cunnane and Lorcan Berry

Well Done!

A couple of weeks ago, Wednesday for Parents covered the Bucket and Spade list and it got us thinking in 5th class about what we hope to achieve over the Summer holidays! We chose three things to aim to get done over July and August – it’ll be interesting to see how we got on when we come back to start 6th class.

Here are our Bucket and Spade Lists in Animoto:

What’s on yours?

This week for ‘Wednesday for Parents’, we’re delighted to publish a guest post from the fantastic Summer Buzz – we’ve spoken about Buzz on many occasions on the blog and you’re bound to have noticed the name popping up in the comments! We have been so lucky to have a Twitter (and real-life friend) like Buzz and when we wanted to talk about ways to get stuck into Summer reading, Maria O’Sullivan was the one to contact! Thanks a million to Maria (and Buzz) for putting together such a brilliant blog post. You can find all previous ‘Wednesday for Parents’ posts here.

The Queen Bee has asked me to chat with all parents about the long summer holidays from school.  The children love being away from the formal and structured learning environment but there is no reason why they cannot keep learning during the summer months.  Reading books every day will keep their reading levels up, extend their vocabulary, improve their spelling and they might even enjoy it.

There are lots of lists of recommended reads for children and most of them have a short blurb on what the book is about.  Dun Laoghaire Rathdown Library Service has produced some great lists of books for all ages from toddlers to teens.  You can download the lists here or you may be able to get hard copies in Shankill Library. Children’s Books Ireland also produce fantastic lists.  You can see them here.

Always remember that the age guidelines given in these lists are very general.  Your child may find the books too easy or too difficult.  Let them decide themselves; they are on their holidays after all.  Use your nearest library to borrow the books.  Membership is free and there is something for all the family there.  You may find that the library also runs a programme of events and activities that are free to attend and a very pleasant way of spending an afternoon if the weather is dull. The contact details for Bray library can be found here.  You might also consider using Shankill Library.  The contact details for Shankill are here.

The Summer Reading Buzz is underway in Shankill so you might even bump into me there.  All you need to do to take part in the challenge is sign up, read 10 books and collect rewards along the way; it’s that simple.

The chart below shows all the things you can do to help your child read this summer.  I spotted it on twitter recently and thought it was the bees knees.  You can view the original here

Enjoy the sun, read lots of books, learn lots of new things.

@summerbuzz.

A couple of weeks ago, Seomra Ranga offered a copy of a book for review on Twitter. We jumped at the chance and ‘Fintan’s Fifteen’ has been steadily making its way around 5th class since. Last week, Alan Nolan, the author, contacted us to offer us a workshop and we snapped it up as quickly as Ollie would a bag of salt and vinegar crisps.

We tweeted our way through Alan’s visit and collected all the Tweets afterwards in a Storify.

Alan signed our pictures that we drew and our mini-comic books. Our classroom door is looking really cool thanks to the giant picture of Ollie he drew for us! We also recorded a podcast of what we learned from and enjoyed about the workshop.

We sent our reviews of ‘Fintan’s Fifteen’ to Seomra Ranga yesterday so we’ll update you when it has been published!

Welcome to the St Peter’s Post, our weekly online newsletter! This week, all classes were busy finishing off their self-assessment folders, their scrapbooks and preparing for the last couple of weeks of the term. With that in mind, the blog was a bit quiet this week, but consider it the calm before the storm – we’ve an exciting two weeks ahead!

The main headlines from this week are:

• This week, we launched our 32 County in 24 hours Challenge. Read all about it here!
• 5th and 6th class visited the Garda station this week and learned lots from our Community Garda Stephen. They also made a podcast about their visit. Listen to it here.
• 4th class updated us on all their recent adventures – read all about them here.
• The World Cup kicked off this week. 2nd class put together a great set of links and facts here.
• Our tennis team from 5th class travelled to Shankill this week – find out how they got on here.

In other news this week:

• We featured in the Bray People and the Wicklow Times this week!
• Today (Monday) is Tommy, our Gaelic coach’s birthday! As we knew we wouldn’t see him today, we celebrated it on Friday with cake and lots of singing. We’re really lucky to have Tommy in St Peter’s – he is popular with staff and students for his good humour, great rapport with the students and hilarious jokes! Happy birthday Tommy – thanks for everything you do in St Peter’s!

• Tommy came in to do hurling training last Monday with all classes – check out our Vine to see how we got on!

•  We’d a very exciting Twitter chat with Alan Nolan, author of the excellent ‘Fintan’s Fifteen’ and he offered to come in and visit us!

• We featured in this month’s INTO magazine!

We are so excited to be in the @INTOnews magazine InTouch! All of the teachers will see us. That is cool! pic.twitter.com/418aHBEFV2 — St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) June 12, 2014

• Mr Kinsella won a set of workbooks from PrimEd Ireland during the week! This is brilliant news for the school as we prepare for next year’s booklists!

• We were delighted to welcome Anne McMorrough to St Peter’s last week. She visited 2nd class, who Skyped with a school in Tipperary and heard all about their Skype with Chris Hadfield, the astronaut. Anne is from Marino and has interacted with a number of our classes on Twitter in the past. She was really impressed with the work in 2nd class!

• Six boys went to the Bray Wanderers match with Mr Foley and Paddy on Friday night. The result may not have gone their way, but they really enjoyed their evening!

We’re looking forward to going to @BrayWanderers vs @bfcdublin tonight with Me. Foley and Paddy! #loipic.twitter.com/rFExPqQ0MQ

— St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) June 13, 2014

This morning, three of 5th class travelled to Shankill Tennis Club to represent St Peter’s in a local tennis tournament. The boys who took part have been attending tennis sessions with Paddy and Conor from the Sports Promotion Unit every week for the last five weeks. Alan represented the school in the singles competition and came second in the tournament. Sam and Johnny took part in the doubles section and came third.

They played three matches against other local schools and really enjoyed the morning. Thanks to Paddy for travelling with them as their coach and to Mr Kinsella for the lifts. 3rd class are currently taking part in tennis sessions on Thursdays with Paul, thanks to School Completion. It’s a great time to get excited about tennis with Wimbledon coming up!

Yesterday, 5th and 6th class visited Bray Garda station as part of our Community Garda, Stephen’s, work with the school. He visited 5th class a couple of weeks ago so we were really interested to see everything that we’d learned about. You can read our previous post here.

We had a really interesting morning in Bray Garda station and we got to see the squad cars, the cells, the medical room, the interview room and the control room where all the emergency calls for County Wicklow come into. We also got to see the CCTV footage from the cameras around Bray. Stephen was really generous with his time and answered the many, many, MANY questions that the students had for him. Thanks a million to Stephen and all the Gardaí at Bray Garda Station for letting us visit.

We made a podcast in 5th class to record what we learned from yesterday’s visit – thanks to Alan for leading the podcast so well!