St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

St. Peter’s have done it again! We have been successful in achieving the Creative Schools Award for 2014. We’re sure you have noticed all of the great work the children have been doing with Stop Motion Animation over the past year, and you weren’t alone! The Association for Creativity and Arts in Education who organise the Creative Schools Award think we are super too!

On Monday, Ms. Byrne and Ms. Flanagan took four of the boys to Temple Bar’s Arc Cultural Centre to represent the school in receiving our award. Patryk, Dylan, Jordan and Szymon were treated to a fun filled day in Dublin. The event consisted of workshops in dance, drama and music followed by a showcase of projects where the boys displayed our Stop Motion Animations with pride. This was then followed by the presentations of awards by the well known children’s author Siobhán Parkinson. It was a pleasure to meet Siobhán and the boys were a credit to all of us representing St. Peter’s.

This is an amazing achievement for St. Peter’s as we are one of only two schools in all of Wicklow to receive this award and only a handful of other schools around the country were successful.

Well done to everyone involved and we look forward to participating again next year.

Video of the days events to follow!

Recently, 5th class read ‘War Horse’ by Michael Morpurgo as their class novel and really enjoyed it. We had a Twitter Q&A session with the Irish National Stud to answer some of the more technical questions from the book and we blogged about that here.

As part of a prize for our excellent attendance, we watched ‘War Horse’ the film over the last few wet lunchtimes. It was really interesting watching it as the film of a book that we’d recently read. Our teacher noticed that we discussed the story a lot as we went along and we kept pointing out similarities and differences between the book and film. We then made a podcast of our thoughts. Well done to Johnny for leading the podcast!

We have to warn you that the podcast contains a lot of spoilers. We recommend that you read the book and watch the film first, if you haven’t already, and then you’ll enjoy our podcast all the more!

Do you like our sheep that we made for the altar in the church?

This Tuesday on the 20th of May, 2nd Class will make their First Confession in our local church, St. Peter’s. Everyone is very excited. We have been working on our prayers, practicing our songs and learning the lines of our story called The Lost Sheep.

We will be singing three songs on Tuesday. They are called Connected, The Lost Sheep and My Shepherd is the Lord.

We will also be saying prayers on the altar.

We know our Lost Sheep story off by heart. Would you like to hear it?

We would like to thank Sr. Patricia and Fr. James for helping us to prepare for our Confession. We will post about our Communion (which is on this Sunday!) later in the week!

Welcome to our online weekly newsletter, the St Peter’s Post. This week was hectic in the school – we had Mathletes announcements, our submission for the Discover Primary Science award, Confirmation, Teachmeet East and a religious visitor. Congratulations to all of our students who made their Confirmation today – the weather was beautiful and they all behaved impeccably on the day. It was lovely to see Ms Whyte and everyone was dying to hear how the twins are getting on. Well done to Mr Staunton for all his hard work in preparing the boys for the ceremony!

Our main piece of work on the blog this week was our submission for the Award for Science and Maths Excellence. The links to all the other science-related posts can be found within it – call it a Saturday supplement in the St Peter’s post! Every class was involved in our submission and it’s well worth a look. Check it out here.

Our other main headlines from this week are:

• Well done to our Mathletes who took part in the Leinster finals in DCU last weekend. Read the post here. Congratulations to Eduard, Lester and Sam who qualified for the National Finals taking place next weekend! We’re very proud of them and all the Mathletes – it’s a fantastic achievement!
• Well done to Ryan and Arturas in Ms Mitchell’s class for their excellent work this week.
• 4th class have been reading ‘Holes’ and used Twitter and Storify to share their thoughts so far. Check it out here.
• A number of our staff and parents took part in the Darkness into Light 5k for Pieta House last week. Read all about this great cause here.
• Ms Mitchell’s class have been learning about Summer. Find out what they’ve learned so far here and their edible ladybirds here.
• ‘Wednesday for Parents‘ this week was all about Ask About Ireland and other resources for researching topics of Irish interest.

Other news this week included:

• We welcomed Donal from the Dublin diocese to discuss our religion lessons on Friday. He commented a number of times on the beautiful manners of the students and how enthusiastic they were.
• On Thursday, we held TeachMeet East in St Peter’s – a forum where teachers and those with an interest in education could share ideas. TeachMeet East is organised by Kathleen Byrne, principal of St Patrick’s NS, Glencullen, and our own Ms Brennan. Among lots of speakers, three of our staff gave presentations. Ms Brennan spoke about our video apps, Ms Byrne spoke about CyberCoach and Ms Sexton spoke about Mathletes in St Peter’s. If you’d like to read all about what happened on the night, the hashtag was #tmeast

Ms Byrne telling #tmeast all about cyber coach and how we use it! pic.twitter.com/3qzyfVNdxf

— St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) May 15, 2014

• 2nd class practised their reading using Soundcloud this week- focusing on fluency and clarity.

• We wrote haikus in 5th class. Haikus have five syllables in the first line, seven in the second and five in the third.

• Stephen the Community Garda visited this week and answered our questions about being a Garda. He’s going to take 5th and 6th classes on a visit to Bray Garda Station in a couple of weeks. Andy got to try on the Garda uniform.

• We’d a great Roots of Empathy session with Paddy during the week in the library.<
  

  Special times, enjoying a @RootsofEmpathy book with Paddy. Not a sound in the house. Memories are made of this! pic.twitter.com/1IbK6M0HFJ

  — St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) May 14, 2014

• We used a Birdsong App to identify the birds in our back yard! It was really cool.
• There’s great excitement about the Creative Schools awards taking place in the Ark on Monday – Ms Byrne and Ms Flanagan are travelling to the awards with Jordan, Dylan, Szymon and Patryk. Have a great day everyone!
• We’ll leave you with the beautiful Confirmation art from 6th class:

Our Confirmation art is up in our local church- well done 6th class! pic.twitter.com/LfWiwOzcqA

— St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) May 16, 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!

The work of week award went to Arturas for his excellent phonics sentences!

Arturas has been working extremely hard for the past few weeks to try to write his sentences by himself using his spellings and sounds. This week he even wrote extra sentences without being asked to!

Well done Arturas, we are all very proud of you!

This week’s student of the week award went to Ryan Kennedy!

Ryan worked hard for the past few weeks to make his written homework better, he had longer sentences with much more detail this week. He also improved on his maths scores and got 100% in both is spellings and tables test.

Well done Ryan!

Welcome to our submission for the Discover Primary Science and Maths award for 2014. As you know, Maths and Science are really important to us here in St Peter’s. There are a number of criteria that needs to be fulfilled when applying for the award. We’re using our blog to submit our award and to link back to our activities during the year. Our AoSME number is WW007.

Step 1: Greenwave -read all about our work about weather and about recording the signs of Spring here.

Step 2: Prescribed activities – Ms Mitchell’s class learned about 2nd class worked on the Materials strand with an experiment on bouncy balls, 3rd class carried out an experiment under the Forces strand using paper helicopters, 4th class learned about Messi’s balance under the Forces strand and 5th class created garden ornaments using the Materials strand. Click on the links below to check out their work:

• Energy and Forces in Ms Mitchell’s class
• Materials in 2nd class
• Energy and Forces in 3rd class
• Energy and Forces in 4th class
• Materials in 5th class

Step 3: Science speaker or visit from Engineer – we were delighted to welcome Scientific Sue to St Peter’s this year. We opened up our show to a number of local schools and really enjoyed our day with her. We all learned lots about science and engineering from Sue’s fantastic show! Read all about our visit from Scientific Sue here.

Step 4: Attend or hold a Science Event – apart from our day with Scientific Sue, we also took full part in Engineer’s Week in February – and won a prize for how well we engaged with the activities throughout the week. Check out our roundup post here. We also held a Science Fair as part of our participation in the Mini-Scientist event. We then held a Virtual Science Fair to showcase some of our projects. One group even presented their project in Intel – read all about that day here.

Step 5: Technology – This year, we were delighted to be awarded two Junior Spider awards for our blog! We use technology to enhance our learning at every opportunity and Science and Maths are no exceptions. Three of our students have qualified for the Mathletes National finals for their use of Khan Academy – you can read more about that here. We also try to use technology to develop our skills in science and maths and to improve our recordings of our learning. You can see how we’ve used Twitter to improve our inferences and observations, Vine to record our predictions and Breaking News app to record our findings.

We hope you enjoyed reading our submission!

3rd Class looked at the Energy and Forces strand of the Science curriculum for Discovery Primary Science, focusing on the topic of gravity. We also integrated this into other subjects such as Maths and History.

Our title was: ‘Investigating How Helicopters Fly’.

Our objectives were:
To investigate gravity as a force
To explore how some things fall
To investigate if the size and shape of the rotor blades affect the way a helicopter spins
To investigate if the weight of the paper helicopter affects the way a helicopter spins

Kian drew this picture to show how we made our paper helicopters:

Here are some photographs and a write up of the experiments we did.

3rd class love Science and we really enjoyed taking part in the Discovery Primary Science project again this year!

The sixth annual Darkness Into Light fundraising event got underway at 4.15am on Saturday morning, 10th May as an estimated 80,000 people turned out for dawn walks at 37 locations across the country and two venues overseas.

Crowds of families, friends, school children, work colleagues and even dogs walked and ran a 5km route in locations from Cork City to Letterkenny, Galway City to our very own Bray Town, in solidarity with those who had lost loved ones to suicide.

Darkness Into Light has grown phenomenally over the years, from 200 people walking in the Phoenix Park in 2009 to 80,000 people taking part across the country and overseas on Saturday.

Around 2500 participants took part in the walk in Bray including a number of teachers and parents from St. Peter’s. Well done to all those involved.

Hello, we are Ms. Brennan’s 2^nd Class. This is our first time to do the Discover Primary Science and Maths Project. We are really excited. We completed part two of the project where we designed and made experiments from the Materials strand. We did the  ‘Which Ball Is The Bounciest’ test.  We hope you enjoy reading our project!

Which ball is the bounciest?

What you need

• A variety of balls
• Metre stick
• Hard surface on which the balls can bounce
• Grass surface on which the balls can bounce

Here we are, showing you the balls we used!

Skills we used for this experiment

1. Predicting

2. Observing

3. Investigating

4. Experimenting

5. Measuring

6.Recording.

What we were taught before we did the experiment

Balls bounce because they are elastic. When a ball hits a hard surface its shape changes – the part touching the ground flattens slightly. It recovers its original shape quickly and bounces back up!

Questions Ms. Brennan asked us

1. Would you use a ball of plasticine to play tennis or ping pong? Why not?

No – because a ping pong ball is bouncy and plastic and a plasticine will just stick to the ping pong bat or tennis racket. If you went to serve the ‘ball’ it would just fall. – Codie and Casey.

2. Do you think the squashy ball will bounce well?

Not that well. Maybe a little bit. – Dylan M and Kayden CD

3. What sort of balls do you think will bounce best?

A tennis ball. I see it on TV when they bounce it on the ground it bounces really high – Dean T and Caoilynn.

4. Does anybody watch tennis on TV?

We do. We know Andy Murray from Scotland. You can play on grass or on clay we think. – Kia and Caithlin

5. Why do you think they change the balls after every 7 games at Wimbledon?

I think they change the balls because every time you bounce/strike a tennis ball, it could lose its shape a little more and it will not be as bouncy! The balls lose their bounce, because some of the air has been knocked out of them, i.e. they are slightly softer) – From Dylan F and Dylan M.

The Experiment

1. First we predicted which of the balls was the bounciest, making it low, medium or high bounce!

2. Then we discussed how we might do a fair test to see if our guesses were right. We asked ourselves questions such as “What are you going to do? What do you think will happen?” How will you make it a fair test?” We dropped the balls from the same height, onto the same surface. The balls were dropped and not thrown.

3. Some heights were difficult to measure. We guess-timated the height of the bounce. We also used words to measure the height.

(i) the bounces were recorded as ‘low’, ‘medium’ or ‘high’ and put in three different piles;

(ii) Two balls were dropped together by the same child (the easiest way to drop balls at the same time!) and their bounces were compared.

(iii) We used charts on the wall to measure height.

(iv) We also used pieces of wool cut to each height, and we hung the pieces of wool to compare.

5. We recorded our results, and we compared these lengths with our predictions. They compared our results with other groups.

We explained our scores.

Proof of our work!

Which surface was best?

The wooden floor was best for bouncing!

The Maths in our project

1. Number: Comparing and Ordering

2. Measures: Length (standard or non-standard)

3. Data: Represent data (e.g. bar charts for different balls on same surface or same ball on different surfaces)

Proof of our work!

Here is proof of our inside test!

Here is proof of our outside test!

Conclusion

We made average bouncing heights from our guess-timates. Here they are!

1. Aviva Bouncy Ball – 43.8cm

2. Green ball with holes – 40.6cm

3. Red sponge ball – 10.2cm

4. Squishy yellow ball – 34.6cm

5. Star bouncy ball – 52cm

6. Yellow sponge ball – 39cm

7. Red plastic bowling ball – 50.4cm

8. Basketball – 53.4cm

9. American football – 28cm

10. Rugby ball – 50cm

If we were doing this again we would make sure we only used balls of the same shape and of same size. This would be a fair test.

The basketball was the bounciest, is it is full of air!

Thank you for reading our project. We hope you enjoyed it! We look forward to doing another project again soon.