St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

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.

Thanks to our local paper, The Bray People for including great pictures of our students in last week’s paper! Thanks to Darren and Shell White for the great pictures that they tweeted us!

Our 6th Class at their Confirmation!

Our Mathletes!

The Fassaroe U-10s after their final!

Ms. Byrne and third class had the most exciting start to their week this morning! A big package was delivered to the school addressed to ‘The Children in Ms. Byrne’s Third Class’.

After much guessing and anticipation about what might be in the package, the boys ripped opened the box. They found the most generous, kind and thoughtful letter inside explaining what they had received. And if you know third class, you could probably guess at what the best possible thing in the world would be for them to receive…

YES you’ve guessed it – LEGO!!!

The package had been sent by none other than the marvellous LEGO Man himself, Bernard Kirk!

Bernard came to visit our classroom and could see how much we love LEGO from our Stop Motion Animations and the LEGO man in our room. Bernard is a teacher who is currently the Director of Galway Education Centre. He works to provide opportunities for young people in Engineering, IT, Robotics, Science, Entrepreneurship, Mathematics and the arts. Bernard is the co-founder of Robotics Ireland, Medtronic Scientist of the Future, Aviators of the Future, Irish Mini Sumo Robotics, Entrepreneurs of The Future and Medtronic KNEX, to name but a few. He also organised the FIRST LEGO League and Junior FIRST LEGO League in Ireland.

We couldn’t be more grateful or thankful to Bernard for this wonderful gift that will bring us hours of fun and excitement. This can only mean one thing…more award winning LEGO Stop Motions and wonderful LEGO creations from third class in the future. J

On Saturday, three of our students – Eduard and Lester Grefaldeo from 6th class and Sam Smith from 5th class attended the Mathletes National Finals. The day began with a session with The Think Academy, who organised a funfair themed maths challenge – including designing the fastest roller-coaster and finding profits for the candyfloss. The boys thoroughly enjoyed this session, just like they enjoyed the CSI themed challenge in DCU. There were 30 students each from 5th class, 6th class, 1st year, 2nd year and 3rd year so chq was full of students, families and teachers.

The Grefaldeos are ready for #mathletesirl – here we go! pic.twitter.com/YokqrVW4Oa

— St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) May 24, 2014

After the challenge with the Think Academy, the students moved onto the online testing and the word problem set. The online testing was a 30 minute challenge of speed and accuracy using Khan Academy. After all the testing was finished, there was a chance to tour the Maths Showcase, which included stands from CoderDojo, Maths Week, The Think Academy and Project Maths. All participating students also had the opportunity to take the Viking Splash tour around Dublin – highly recommended by our students. Each student then received a goody bag and a Mathletes t-shirt – the photo of the Communion Choir the next morning gives a hint to how much of a hit the t-shirts were!  

The boys checking out the brilliant @CoderDojo stand #mathletesirl pic.twitter.com/IZAaa8eOlo

— St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) May 24, 2014

The awards ceremony was the final part of our fantastic day out. Seán O’Sullivan and Bernard Kirk presented the awards to the students and the schools on the day. We were delighted when it was announced that we were the top primary school in Leinster in both categories! Congratulations to all the winners on the day – Cloughfin NS, our Twitter friends from Donegal, won the National Title for most points per student and we were thrilled to be there to cheer them on.

The Think Academy section of the day was a team event and Eduard was delighted to be on the winning team – again! He was also on the winning team in DCU. We were really excited when it was announced that there was to be a draw for a day’s workshop with the Think Academy and we were over-the-moon when it was announced that we won! The Think Academy are coming to Peter’s!

Thanks so much to all those involved in Mathletes – particularly to Seán O’Sullivan and to Minister Ciaran Cannon. A massive thanks has to go to Kelly Kirkpatrick, who co-ordinated the whole event! We had a fantastic day and we’re really grateful for all of her hard work. We’d recommend Mathletes and Khan Academy to every school and student – we hope you sign up for 2015 – we definitely will! Thanks to our three students on the day, who represented their classmates so well. They really did us proud on the day and over the months before. The two families who travelled on the day deserve great thanks too – thanks to Sam’s mum and to Eduard and Lester’s mum, along with Lester and Eduard’s little brother and sister, who came along to cheer on the Mathletes!

Welcome to the Peter’s Post – our weekly online newsletter!

A very busy weekend in St Peter’s Bray – we’d Mathletes all day on Saturday (more on that later!) and our fantastic 2nd class made their Communion on Sunday. We also had a hectic four day week, preparing for polling and welcoming Neal from Digital Schools!

The main headlines are:

• Ms Byrne took a group to collect our Creative Schools award in the Ark this week – check out the photos here. If you haven’t seen our Creative Schools submission, check it out here.
• Yesterday, three of our students represented our school at the National Finals of Mathletes. Oisín interviewed them about their preparations for the day out in chq here. How did they get on? You’ll have to wait for the blog post tomorrow… or check out our Twitter feed from yesterday 🙂
• We were delighted to welcome Neal from Digital Schools to the school during the week. Want to know more about the Digital Schools process? Read all about it here.
• 2nd class celebrated their first Reconciliation this week with the story of the Lost Sheep. Read all about their preparations here.
• Recently 5th class were visited by our Community Garda to answer our questions about being a Garda. During the week, we interacted with the @gardainfo account on Twitter as they ran a Q&A session with a sergeant from the Garda Dog Unit. We collected all of our new information in this blog post.
• Tommy is back with another video – we love his dance-off. You have to check it out here – and while you’re there, read the fantastic comments from some of our online friends, @MerryBeau and @SummerBuzz. It’s lovely to get such supportive and encouraging feedback and Tommy loves reading your comments!
• The Student Council had an epic podcast catching up on all the news from the last few weeks – listen to it here.
• 2nd class are learning about Irish myths and legends – check out the Brown Bull of Cooley and the Children of Lir here. Their podcasting skills are amazing!
• 5th class also podcasted this week. They finished their novel, ‘War Horse’ and watched the film version. Their podcast is a discussion on the different treatment of the story in each. Listen to it here.

In other news this week:

• Congratulations to 2nd class who made their first Holy Communion today. Thanks Ms Brennan for preparing them so beautifully and to Sr Patricia and Fr James. Well done to our choir, who sang beautifully!

Congratulations to our students and big thanks to Ms B for all her great work preparing a lovely Communion ceremony! pic.twitter.com/BryHZJznaw

— St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) May 25, 2014

Thanks to our choir too- a mix of 3rd-6th classes! Lovely to see them supporting 2nd class! #schoolspirit pic.twitter.com/U2oHLiGTt2 — St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) May 25, 2014

• 4th class were busy filming stop-motion films with Mr Kinsella this week – we can’t wait to see the finished results!

Scripts ready, we are now making the props to go with our lego! #4thclass pic.twitter.com/QwDvR98C5X

— St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) May 21, 2014

• Mr Foley and Paddy took four more students to the Bray Wanderers match on Friday – this is a really cool way of interacting with the local community! They tweet throughout the matches with predictions and commentary. Bray Wanderers are great supporters of ours on Twitter so we’re delighted to encourage their younger generation of fans!

Half time @BrayWanderers match, 4 new biggest fans for the future! pic.twitter.com/E70TrscgEZ

— St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) May 23, 2014

• Thanks to our friends in St Brigid’s in Greystones, who sent us a card for our First Holy Communion this week.

Guess who it is from?! @2ndClassR6! So kind! Thanks everyone! pic.twitter.com/Ri9lKc3AfY

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

• Baby T was in for Roots of Empathy – he’s started to crawl!

Look who is here! @RootsofEmpathy pic.twitter.com/VSmfdFqAFd

— St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) May 21, 2014

We’ve a busy week ahead as we’re starting our standardised testing. It’s really important that all students are in every day and are in on time! Attendance has been excellent so far this year so keep up the great work. Don’t forget that Breakfast Club is open to all students from 8.30 onwards and all are welcome! Sports Day is on this coming Friday and we’ll be posting our timetable when it’s ready – Paddy has done a great job organising it.

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!

On Saturday, three of our students will represent our school in the National Finals of Mathletes. Sam from 5th class and Lester and Eduard from 6th class will be travelling to chq in the city centre to compete against 57 other primary school students. We’ve blogged quite a lot about our experiences of Mathletes and Khan Academy and you can find all our posts about them here. We thought that it would be fitting to interview the finalists from the school – and Oisín was the man for the job! Best of luck to the boys in the finals – only 60 primary school students qualified so to have 3 finalists from our small school is an amazing achievement!

We heard some really exciting news during the week. Mathletes announced the top 3 schools from each province, but they’ll announce the order of 1st, 2nd and 3rd on Saturday. We’re in the top 3 primary schools in Leinster – and we can’t wait to hear where we’ve placed at the awards ceremony. We’re also very proud to be the top primary school in County Wicklow!

Finally, a big thanks to Shell White, one of our parents, for sending us the photo of our Mathletes in the Bray People this week. The article was to celebrate our County Winners – Leon in 5th and Eduard in 6th and the three national finalists.

2nd Class have been learning about Irish Myths and Legends. We know lots about different stories from many, many years ago. We loved reading and retelling the stories. We decided to podcast about three of them and we also decided to make storyboards to put different parts of the story in order. We hope you like our videos and podcasts!

He’s done it again! Tommy Lang in 4th Class has made yet another outstanding stop-motion video! This one has a performance edge to it… do you know the work of the St. Peter’s Dance Academy? You will now! This video contains flash photography and epic lighting! What are you waiting for? Get watching!

See Tommy’s previous videos here, here and here!

dc (fixed fixed done) from St Peter’s, Bray on Vimeo.

We are so, so busy in St. Peter’s at the moment! Don’t miss our latest Student Council podcast with all the latest news from our school!

Last week, Stephen, the Community Garda, came in to visit us to talk to us about the work of the Gardaí. We’d loads of questions for him and we learned a lot from him. We recorded a podcast about what we learned from him.

Earlier in the week, we noticed on the @gardainfo Twitter account that they were having a Q&A session with a member of the Garda Dog Unit. We posted questions, as did our friends in Cloghan’s Hill School. We storified the answers to make them easier to read. Twitter is a cool way to access information on topics that we’re interested in – we’d a previous Q&A with the Irish National Stud recently – check it out here. Here’s our Storify of all our questions and the answers: (more…)