St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

This week’s work of the week award goes to Nathan K.

Nathan wrote ten fantastic sentences from his phonic words yesterday and he was only asked to write three!

Not only that, his handwriting was neat and tidy too!

Well done Nathan!

After much anticipation the long wait is over… After many weeks working on his full length Stop

Motion Animation Jordan is finally ready to release his movie to the world! This critically acclaimed

feature film will leave you on the edge of your seat wanting more. Luckily Jordan has a sequel

scheduled for pre summer release. Now sit back and enjoy!

IMG 0172[1] from St Peter's, Bray on Vimeo.

James, Szymon and Lex created their Stop Motion Animation called ‘The Chase’. We hope you enjoy

watching it as much as we did making it! Well done boys!

IMG 0160[1] from St Peter’s, Bray on Vimeo.

This week, we’re integrating our usual work (along with other exciting events) with Tech Week Ireland and with Digital Art Week. One way that 5th class have taken part in both events was to experiment with SketchUp. SketchUp has a bit of a history in St Peter’s. In 2009, 6th class at the time were declared the Senior Engineering Class of Ireland. In the lead up to the finals, they presented a project at the BT Young Scientist Primary Science Fair (and won the top prize on the day with two other schools!). The class were looking out for ways to develop their project and Leon (Kelsey and Calvin’s brother) tried out SketchUp at the Exhibition. He suggested that the class try it out and the boys ended up designing lifeboats and lifeboat stations using the programme, seriously impressing the judges!

Fast forward 5 years and the most updated version of SketchUp has been downloaded onto the library computers again. This week, 5th class enjoyed free play with SketchUp, learning how to use all of the features and playing around with shape and space. The boys worked collaboratively, sharing new features as they learned how to use them and making suggestions about how to improve their houses. In the next week or two, they’re going to use their new-found skills to complete the design part of a Design and Make project using electricity. We really recommend that you try out SketchUp – many of the boys have downloaded the programme at home and are creating cities – and most importantly, it’s free!

Check out our first buildings below:

In the latest ‘reflection’ post from the Eircom Junior Spiders Awards, we share some of the exciting interviews we gave on the day. We were so lucky to be interviewed by Ireland’s largest independent radio station, Today FM. Juliette from Today FM interviewed Caoilynn, Tommy, James, Oisín and Ms. Brennan. It was an amazing experience, especially considering that tens of thousands of people listen to this station every day! Well done to our brilliant students who did us proud as always. Listen to the clips from the 1pm and 4pm news below! Thanks to Today FM for letting us put this clip on our blog.

After many months of learning about stop-motion animations, apps, lighting, sound, props and recording… here it is. Our complete Creative Schools Awards project in one massive blogpost!

So… here it is!

Our project has taken us four months to complete. We decided to use our love of ICT and Art in as creative and interesting a way as possible in putting together a stop-motion animation project. We got the idea as early in the year, during Culture Night 2013, our local theatre (The Mermaid) ran a number of events on the night, including children’s animation workshops.

We in St. Peter’s booked two places for our students to take part in the stop-motion animation workshop. Leon from 5th and Eduard from 6th took part and had a fantastic time. Both students came back to school, looking forward to teaching their classes how to use stop-motion animation.

The group who organised the workshop edited the stop-motion clips from all the children into one video. The clips are very entertaining. You might notice that Leon’s clip is a sequel to Eduard’s! Here it is:

So, back the boys came to school – they inspired us all! Suddenly,  lots of the children started talking about stop-motion apps and videos they have made at home in the past.  A whole new world opened up for us.

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.

As we had 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, it was a great source of inspiration.

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! Here is his response to us.

So, we were inspired further.

Enter Tommy. Tommy Lang is an amazing boy in our 4th Class. He is passionate about his stop-motion videos. Here he is, speaking about it!

Tommy wanted to make more and more videos. He combined his love of lego and stop-motion to make this, his first video. We first blogged about this video here, on the 7th of February. Have a look at it!

Here is Tommy, talking about this video!

By the time his next video came about, Tommy Lang in 4th Class was known all over Bray as a stop-motion video making wizard! We were so proud of the work he does. The next video was  all about the work that takes places in an airport! It is truly amazing. He uses voice and audio clips from the internet and his bedsheets act as clouds. It is just so clever. You must see it here. It was first aired on March 5th, on this blogpost!

Tommy speaks about this video on this podcast!

While all of this was happening, Jordan Farrell (also 4th Class!) and Mr Kinsella got to work on another video! While this feature-length film isn’t ready for publication just yet, check out the amazing trailer! They blogged about this on the 27th March. 

We can’t wait for that one to finish! Who needs the Lego Movie? WOW!

3rd Class also really took to the Creative Schools project. Here are the videos that they made!

This was their first video. It was an amazing collective effort! They shared their thoughts on this blogpost here. We love that they chose to use Lego as they enjoy playing with it so much. Watch out for the way they zoomed in to get closer to the action. 3rd class worked in groups of three to plan and design their characters, props and storylines and then Ms Byrne and Mr Kinsella helped them to film and edit their work.

Dylan, Arturas, TJ, Lex and James made this video ‘An Timpiste’ – they made it using their lego and translated the parts as Gaeilge! Ar fheabhas! They had first blogged about this on April 11th!  They made their own sound effects in this film. Also, watch out for the special effects, we promise that no Lego men were harmed in the filming of that fall!

John, Chris, Szymon and Kian didn’t want to miss out either! Here is their amazing effort called ‘Éalú Emmett’! They first blogged about it here. The clock in the background was an inspired idea to show time passing. Third class held the premiere of their films during Seachtain na Gaeilge and we thought it was an amazing way to demonstrate how animation and creativity can be integrated into all areas of the curriculum!

All of this work from 3rd Class took place in school, however that wasn’t enough for many of our amazingly creative students! Cathal from 3rd class and Robert from 5th class decided to use the blog to showcase their excellent stop-motion films made at home! Again, they used Lego and a stop-motion app to create two videos. Check this one out, first shared on this blog post.

While all of this was going on we continued our ‘Creative Schools’ after school club, tackling our understanding of stop-motion and especially the use of clay. We continued to blog about this experience weekly.

Here are some of our Vines!

On we went. Tommy’s work got even better and better. This is his latest video! Is is wonderful. This time, listen to his wonderful podcast about it before you watch the video!

Now, here is the video itself, first posted on this blogpost. 

Creative schools has been a really positive experience for the students of St Peter’s, best seen through the comments left on the blog posts related to the project. We created an Animoto of these blog comments to represent the reaction of the student community!

Teacher reflection:
We got great feedback from all of the work done. We really enjoyed the project to date. It has become something that we would like to continue – especially as students like Tommy, Jordan and Patryk have projects they really want to complete before the school year is out. The project has become a massive after-school, children-working-on-their-own style project. 3rd and 4th Class have really taken to it, and our SEN team are also working with children on projects! It has become a differentiated, cross-curricular activity and we’ve produced work as Gaeilge and in English, as you have seen.

To help get around the project we created a tab on the right of the blog linking you to all of our work. We changed our original theme as the children were struggling with the clay. We went down the road of allowing them to work at home (they wanted to spend more time on it than we had in school or after-school club!) and also to use Lego that they had already, as it was cheaper. We weren’t in a position to ask the parents to spend money on clay, so we felt that this was a better option. They ended up making videos that didn’t fit the theme. The process and creativity was ever-present, the content just changed.

There were four teachers involved in the project: Mr Kinsella, Ms Sexton, Ms Byrne and Ms Brennan. Ms Sexton and Ms Brennan run a technology-based after-school club, so some of the work was done there too, if the children wanted to do it.

While everyone was involved in the project, you’d be right in thinking that we were inspired by one of our own. Tommy Lang in 4th Class is a magician with stop-motion, while his 6th Class colleague Patryk Ostapczuk was instrumental in the filming process and teaching the younger children about stop-motion techniques. Here they are, our student co-ordinators for the whole project.

This was a wonderful project to take part in. It invigorated our blog with exciting media and inspired the children to work alone and in groups, at home and in school. It highlighted a positive use of social media and really motivated the children to ‘report’ on their work through the blog.

We truly love to take on creative projects like film club and we essentially saw this porject as a variation of it. And by the way, did you see our Crusher Curran film?

We would be honoured to be awarded the Creative Schools Award, and believe that it would give the children the confidence to take on their talents and bring them to a higher level!

Thank you for taking time to read our submission!

The 2014 Eircom Junior Spiders winners were announced at a ceremony at Google HQ in Dublin today. Hosted by RTÉ’s Aidan Power, the awards recognise and reward primary and post primary students for the innovative ways they use the internet, especially around website development, school blogs and design.

Here’s our Animoto of some of our many photos – well done Oisín, our photographer from the day.

If you can’t see the Animoto, please click here.

Thanks a million for all the good wishes from near and far – expect a Storify in the next day or two capturing all the lovely tweets we received!

A little message from our Voki friend ahead of our exciting day at the Eircom Junior Spider Awards. Good luck to our students Caoilynn, Tommy, James and Oisín who will represent us on the day at Google HQ in Dublin. We’re so proud of you all! Have a great day, win or lose!

2nd Class had great fun learning about Pop Art apps for #artweek14 today. They used an app on their iPad to create their own Andy Warhol pictures. Have a look!

Check out our wall on the #artweek14 page here!

Can you guess who this is?!

In Ms. Mitchell’s class we were so excited to find out what was going to happen next in The Twit’s so we read THREE chapters of the book today!

We all took turns reading and listening carefully to the story.

Mr. Twit was trying to help Mrs. Twit grow taller by stretching her. He tied her ankles to a ring in the ground and then he tied her neck and wrists to 60 gas filled balloons.  Mr. Twit planned to leave her there for a few days but then he had a different idea. He cut the  strings on her ankles and Mrs. Twit went up into the sky like a rocket! Mrs. Twit was very clever and she bit 21 balloon strings and she floated back down to earth. When she was coming back down the birds flew past and saw her knickers!! We all thought this was hilarious.

After every chapter we talked about what had happened in that chapter and how Mr and Mrs Twit might have felt.

Then we predicted what was going to happen in the next chapter.  We were all happy and laughed at some of the predictions. Arturas thought that Mrs. Twit would fly away up to space,  Johnny thought Mrs. Twit was going to get stretched out very tall and I thought Mrs. Twit was going to fall and hurt herself. We all found the predictions very funny and couldn’t wait to keep reading and find out who was right.

We are really enjoying reading The Twits and  can’t wait to see what is going to happen next!

By Lorcan Berry