St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

Welcome to our weekly online newsletter – the St. Peter’s Post! We’ve quite a short edition this week – but we’ve an excellent excuse! It was papier-mâché central in St Peter’s this week and we’re very egg-cited to unveil it next week. Students and staff struggled to blog with paste-covered hands – hence the lack of documentation! We’ve a big week ahead however, and we can’t wait to show off our newly decorated corridor.

We have lots of big news though this week – it was a great week for us!

Here are the week’s headlines:

• We started off the week with some fantastic news – we’ve been nominated for a Junior Spiders award in TWO categories – for Best Blog and Best Website. We’re thrilled and honoured to have our work recognised in this way. You can read our post here. Check out our fellow nominees here.
• On Monday, we celebrated the achievements of our Write A Book winners in Killiney. You can check out our post here.
• Ms Mitchell’s class planted sunflower seeds this week. We can’t wait to see how well they grow! Read their post here.
• 5th and 6th classes been doing really well in the Mathletes challenge and we received some exciting news via Twitter from Seán O’Sullivan this week. Check it out here.
• Ms Mitchell’s class have been studying Data recently – check out their fantastic work here.
• 5th class are reading ‘War Horse’ and they contacted the Irish National Stud for a Twitter Q&A here. Read all the excellent questions and answers here.
• We’re taking part in a handwriting competition at the moment – you can read all the details here.
• And on the topic of handwriting, our ‘Wednesday for Parents’ recommended links to help improve your child’s handwriting.
• Ben and Jordan were praised for their excellent work in Ms Mitchell’s class this week. Well done boys!

In other news this week:

• We had a storyteller in to speak to us all on Friday – his name was Brendan Nolan. We’re looking forward to sharing everything we’ve learned from him later in the week!
• Members of the Parents’ Association visited again this week to organise Maths for Fun for the classes.
• Thanks to Paddy, for organising lunchtime tag rugby. It’s been very popular with the senior classes!
• We signed up for Tech Week Ireland – you can read more about it here.
• 2nd class covered Sleep in Roots of Empathy this week.
• We can’t wait to welcome Scientific Sue on Tuesday – and all the schools who are visiting to join in the fun!

So, there’s a snapshot of the week in St Peter’s! As always, you can find all of our previous St Peter’s Postshere and now, with the new 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!

This week’s work of the week in Ms. Mitchell’s Class is from Ben Cunnane.

Ben got 100% in his mental maths on Wednesday and 95 % on Thursday!

He had hardly any help too!

Well Done Ben!

This week’s Student of the Week in Ms. Mitchell’s Class is…

JORDAN KEDDY!

Jordan had full attendance this week and completed his homework every night (including his learning homework!).

He worked hard to make his sentences longer and got 100% in both his spelling and tables test this week!

Well Done Jordan!!!

You may have seen in an earlier post today that we’re currently taking part in a handwriting competition. Today’s ‘Wednesday for Parents’ suggests a number of links that may be useful to you if your child needs extra help to improve their handwriting. As always, your experience is invaluable and we’d love to hear your tips for helping with handwriting. Let us know in the comments!

• Our first link this evening comes from NALA and is absolutely excellent. We’ve featured content from NALA before and their work is always of high quality. This publication is called Better Handwriting for Adults, but has a number of tips that would be particularly suitable to older children and children who have severe difficulties with making their handwriting clear.
• This site provides a number of practice sheets for children to trace particular letters and shapes. Certain letters are slightly different to how your child may write them for school – keep a particular eye on letters like ‘r’, ‘s’, ‘f’ and ‘k’.
• This site gives an overview of how to help your child to become a better writer – while it gives more detail than some of the other sites as it’s designed to inform teachers about teaching handwriting, it’s very useful if your child is a bit older and really struggles with handwriting.
• Difficulties in handwriting can be an indication of difficulties with other skills. Gross motor skills are the skills involved when your child uses the larger muscles in his/her body – for example, walking, running, rolling and jumping. Fine motor skills involve the smaller muscles – often using fingers and toes. Fine motor skills help your child’s handwriting. This link has a number of suggestions to help your child develop their fine motor skills.

As always, you can find all previous ‘Wednesday for Parents’ posts here. We’d love to update our post with your tips – let us know what you recommend!

We’re delighted to be taking part in the INTO District 8 Handwriting Awards this term. We have decided to combine our entries with Mr. Curran’s Handwriting Awards! Mr. Curran retired from our school last year and to remember him and his love of handwriting, we set up a handwriting competition.

Many of you will be taking part in the competition in the next two weeks, so we decided that it would make sense to share the rules of the competition on the blog, in case some of you are working on your entries at home! Remember, entries are judged on ‘style, flair, neatness and layout’ of handwriting!

 The Rules:

• Entries should be written on a single A4 page, ruled or un-ruled.
•  No particular script or style is necessary and there is no set text.
• The focus is solely on handwriting, no pictures or illustrations.
• Entrants have two options to write a piece of prose or a poem.
• Foreign languages are included in the competition
• Do not mount the handwriting entries.
• Use pencil and/or pen as per guidelines.
• Use only one side of the sheet of paper.
• Entries cannot be returned.

Your teacher will tell you how many words you have to write. What are you waiting for? Get your entry ready now! PS. You may not win an Oscar, but there will be a prize!

Last night, four of our students went to Killiney Castle Hotel for the Write A Book awards! Casey from 2nd class, Luke from 4th, Ben from 5th and Kyle from 6th were very excited to receive their medals and certificates from Pat Seaver from the Blackrock Education Centre and Mary Mitchell O’Connor, TD.

Casey’s story was called ‘Bullies Never Win’ and had a beautiful theme of friendship and loyalty. You can read her story here.

Luke’s story was called ‘The Dwarven City of Dishea’ – a story to give the Hobbit a run for its money!

Ben’s story was called ‘The Irish Rangers’ and was full of action and adventure!

Kyle’s story was called ‘A Black Arrow’ – a fantasy adventure that took the reader into the world of the funfair/circus!

Parents, grandparents and teachers of the four authors from St Peter’s were there to cheer them on!

Congratulations to the four authors and to all of our students who took part in the Write a Book project. We’re very proud of their work and we can’t wait to collect it from Blackrock Education Centre next week!

Yesterday was an amazing day for our school. After just 13 months of blogging and our website launching just a couple of weeks ago… we have managed to receive not one, but TWO Eircom Junior Spider nominations! You can see the full shortlist here!

This is a huge achievement for our school, and something that the boys and girls in St. Peter’s can be very proud of. The nominations will encourage us to keep using ICT and social media to learn from and communicate well with the outside world. As a result of our nominations, we have been invited to the Google European Head Office in Dublin on April 29th for a day of celebration and awards-giving.

Thank you to our many online friends, be it other schools or supporters who have sent us messages of goodwill in the past day. It is so nice to show our students how to behave online and how the internet can be a force of positivity in our lives.

Some of our students recorded a podcast to celebrate and say a huge THANK YOU for our nomination!

ps. Here are some of the lovely tweets we received yesterday!

@StPetersBray @Juniorspiders Well done folks from all the Boys in St Colman’s, Cork

— St Colman’s BNS (@colmansbns) March 31, 2014

@StPetersBray Well done on making the #JuniorSpiders shortlist not once but twice 🙂 http://t.co/eRIZo6dTix #UpBray #UpWicklow

— 2ndClassR6 (@2ndClassR6) March 31, 2014

Well done to our twitter friends @gortskehy @CloughfinNS @StPetersBray on being nominated for @eircomspiders internet awards

— St. Colman’s N.S. (@derrinabrocns) March 31, 2014

Check out the incredible shortlist of nominees for the 2014 Eircom Junior Spider Awards. We’re delighted to feature among such a high standard! Well done to our fellow nominees. We look forward to meeting you all!

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Project:

• Clontuskert Tribune Newspaper, St. Augustine’s N.S. Clontuskert
• Craggagh Blue Star, Craggagh NS
• NETNS Wildlife Zone, Newbridge Educate Together National School
• St.Brigid’s Greystones, Green Schools Blog, St.Brigid’s NS, Greystones
• The Baking Buddies, Rathoe N.S.
• The Laois Plantation Project, Killeen N.S.
• These Boots Are Made For Walking, St Ibars N.S. Clohamon

Best School Blog:

• Blog na Scoile, Gaelscoil Mhuscraí
• Ms. Fay’s 4th Class Blog, St. Brigid’s National School, Castleknock
• No Child An Outsider, Balbriggan ETNS
• Rang 1, Ag Foghlaim le Chéile, Gaelscoil Sáirséal, Limerick
• Scoil Chaitríona Junior Blog, Scoil Chaitríona Junior, Renmore
• St. Peter’s Bray Blog, St. Peter’s Primary, Bray
• Window to our school, Inver National School, Ballina

Best School Website:

• Cloughfin N.S., Cloughfin N.S. Ballindrait
• Connecting Our Community to the World, Christ the King Primary School, Omagh
• Gaelscoil Mhuscraí, Gaelscoil Mhuscraí, Cork
• Gortskehy N.S., Gortskehy N.S. Mayo
• Scoil Mhuire, Scoil Mhuire, Monaghan
• Scoil Mhuire NS, Scoil Mhuire, Kildare
• St. Peter’s Primary, Bray school website, St. Peter’s Primary, Bray

In March we did a LOT of work on data during our maths lessons.

We found out that data is showing information in lots of different ways.

We used pictograms, tally charts and bar charts. Bar charts were our favourites ( “Yum” said Adam!)

We worked in teams of 2 to ask the whole school what was their favourite break time fruit?

They could choose between an apple, orange or banana.

We made tally charts in our copies when we asked each class. Next we went back to our class and

made bar charts from the information.

Then we made giant posters to show every class’s choice of fruit. We drew bar charts with our rulers and pencils, then we wrote the titles and coloured them  in neatly. After that some of us wrote up facts about the bar charts.

We had a lot of fun doing this project.

We are very proud of our work and how well we worked together in our teams.

Please come by and take a look at our surveys , they will be outside our room very soon!!

By Adam and Arturas ( and a little bit of help from Ms. Mitchell)