St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

Some very excited St. Peter’s students with their finished books!

Well done to the boys and girls who completed the Write-A-Book project just before the midterm break.

We were delighted with the standard of the finished books and we hope that the students are really proud of the work done.

This is the first time we have participated in the project and we really enjoyed it.

Our books have now been sent to other schools and teachers for correction. We are also lucky enough to have the chance to read the work of children from other local schools as part of the project!

One book from each class will be picked as a ‘Merit Book’ and three will be ‘Highly Commended’. We will find out soon who the lucky winners are!

Book Fair posters are up around the school!

We are very excited to announce that we will be holding our annual Scholastic Book Fair in the hall all of next week, 3rd – 7th March. It is always a great event and something to look forward to as we celebrate World Book Day on Thursday March 6th.

Ms. Sugrue is looking after the organisation of the Book Fair and has distributed magazines outlining the names of the books that will be available at the Fair. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch!

Hold onto your hats – we’ve a flood of posts for you this week! It may have been a slow traffic week on the roads, but it certainly hasn’t been on the blog. We think it might be the busiest week yet. We can credit it to two big events – Engineer’s Week 2014 and the blog birthday!

Let’s get started with our Saturday supplement on Engineer’s Week:

• The week kicked off with a Wordle from 5th class about what we associate with Engineering. We then updated it on Friday to see what we learned during the week. See both Wordles here!
• 5th class then learned about different types of engineering and made a podcast about the areas that interest us the most. Listen to it here.
• We held a KNEX challenge for 2nd and 5th class teams to build Katie Taylor Towers (in case Bray ever hosts the Olympics). Check out the Animoto and excellent Vines here.
• 6th class took on Electric Paint to make robots this week as part of their work for Engineer’s Week. Check out their work here.
• We also have a round-up of all our Engineer’s Week activities here. Well worth a look!

In other headlines: (more…)

We’ve had a ball with Engineer’s Week this week! Here’s a round up post of all the activities that took place in different classes over the week…

• 2nd Class made Apple Mummies! You’ll find out how they did it here.

Our apple mummies!

• They also did the ‘raw egg’ test. It is definitely something that you could all try at home! Find out how to do it here!

Our raw egg test

What the egg looked like after the vinegar dissolved the shell! We put it over the light to be able to see through it!

• When we looked at electrical engineering we made string telephones.

We made string telephones!

• Bending water? Is it possible? It is! Try it out here!

Bending Water

• We also had the K’nex Challenge, read about it here

Our KNEX winners! Well done Davy, Aaron and Nathan!

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• 5th class used ‘Think-Pair-Wordle-Share’ to track what we learned about Engineer’s Week from Monday to Friday. Read all about it here.

Monday’s Wordle

Friday’s Wordle

• They also used Blockly to improve problem-solving skills. You can check out the link here.

The Blockly tutorial – perfect for developing problem-solving skills!

• They also made a podcast about the different types of engineering and which one they’re interested in. Listen to it here.
• On Friday, they started a project to draw skylines – drawing on what they’ve learned about civil engineering. Expect a post about that when they start back after midterm!
• Part of engineering involves developing products and testing them out. We bought a Flashing Robot kit to test out Electric Paint. 6th class carried out great work on these this week – you can read their post here.
  

  The Bare Conductive Flashing Robots kit

As you can see, we had a great week! You can also see our activities from last year’s Engineering Week here, here and here. (It’s very cool to be able to link back to last year’s work – now that we’re a year old!)

Today we had a delicious fundraiser in St Peter’s!

Ewa and Anna are travelling to Kenya to teach for the Summer and they’re fundraising at the moment for the trip. Ewa is the sister of Patryk from 6th class and we were delighted to get involved in helping them to prepare for such a worthwhile project. The fundraiser was a really popular one. The students ordered pizza slices, which the girls got for a reduced price from Four Star Pizzas. We were delighted to raise €129.40 for the trip and it was a lovely way to celebrate St Valentine’s Day, though we should note that there wasn’t anyone so smitten enough to share their pizza slices!

Well done to Eva and Anna for their organisation and their initiative and well done to our students, parents and staff for getting behind it so enthusiastically!

Every year we use K’nex to help us to explore and improve our construction and engineering skills. This year, our K’nex challenge became part of our Engineering Week 2014 set of activities. Previous challenges include building a bridge, building a lifeboat and building a quad bike.

This year we decided to have a local slant on the activity. As you all know, Bray is the hometown of Katie Taylor. We set a challenge to the students to build a tower called after Katie, that would be the centre-point if Bray ever hosted the Olympics. We can dream! The design needed to be:

1. Between 50cm and 1m tall.

2. Secure enough to stand alone (without support!) and able to withstand weather like the gales we have at the minute!

3. It also needed to be colourful, well planned and have a revolving restaurant at the top!

2nd and 5th class paired up into groups and we had a ball completing the challenge.  All of the entries are pictured below, in photos and in the videos. I think you’ll agree that the results were amazing!

Congratulations to Davy, Aaron and Nathan for winning the challenge. It was so hard to pick a winner! We can’t wait for the K’nex Challenge for Engineering Week 2015!

The finalists:

More wonderful entries!

The Winners!

Welcome to Engineers Week in St Peter’s! This morning in 5th class, we started thinking about what we know about engineers.

We started by thinking individually about words that come to mind when we hear the word ‘engineer’. We also drew pictures of what we think an engineer looks like.

Next, we worked in pairs to discuss what we know about engineers.

Then we shared our work with the rest of the class.

We made a Wordle to show what we think an engineer does, at the start of Engineers Week. We’re going to make another one on Friday to assess what we’ve learned in the meantime. We wonder if it’ll change much!

We use Think-Pair-Share a lot to get us thinking, but the Wordle is a new addition. It was suggested in a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) course with the RDS that Ms Sexton is attending at the moment. You can learn more about the course here.

This type of assessment is important so that the teacher knows where the class is starting from, so that he/she can plan the lessons more effectively. Assessment that feeds into teaching and learning like this is called formative assessment or assessment for learning.

Updated: Here’s our Wordle from the end of the week. Look carefully to see what we learned during Engineer’s Week 2014!

Today, we investigated circuits and Electric Paint. Part of the work of an engineer is to design and to build everyday items so that they work better! Electric Paint can be used instead of wires to conduct electricity. This is our finished work! We used a Vine to show off a selection of them!

We’ve been working on a kit from Bare Conductive, which you can find out more about here. We’re big fans of Electric Paint and we used it previously in our school-winning project for the Mini-Scientist. We had to let the paint dry.

One year ago, today, St Peter’s published its first blog post. This is our 289th post in that year and as we announced yesterday, Aaron Gray posted our 1000th comment this week. With this in mind, we postponed this week’s ‘Wednesday for Parents’ to coincide with the birthday, so that we could focus on a very special topic – the blog.

So, why do we blog? And why do we believe it’s worth it? We asked the people who know best, our students!

I like blogging because it’s really fun and you can see what’s going on in the school – Johnny

I like when we work in groups to blog – Carl and Jordan

We get to share our work with the school and people on the Internet. I like the animations the best. – Dylan

My favourite thing on the blog is making it fun for other children – Dylan

It’s a good thing to be proud of your work – Abbi

I like saying nice stuff to other classes in my comments. I like the way you can change the language on the blog so when you go on holidays to other countries, you can show them your work! – Aaron

I like saying nice stuff to other classes – Ryan

The blog is very interesting and inspiring. It gives you Maths games to try out at home – Luke

I like the fact that it lets other people know about us and we can show people all that we’ve accomplished. – Leon

My favourite thing on the blog is Tommy’s Lego Video! – Dylan

As you can see from the selection we asked today, the students are largely very positive about blogging! What the students like about blogging sits very closely with the benefits of blogging that we’ve noticed. These include:

• Blogging gives a parents an insight into the day-to-day life of the school – many of our parents have commented that it’s a lovely way to keep track of what your child is learning in school, particularly through photos, videos and podcasts.
• Blogging encourages positive interactions between our older and younger students. – the senior classes in the school are excellent for praising the work of the youngest students in the comments sections.
• Blogging encourages our students to take pride in their great work and to enjoy the praise and compliments from staff, students and parents that posting their work brings.
• Blogging provides a focus on writing for purpose – the students enjoy writing blog posts and work really hard on their writing and editing.
• Blogging promotes sharing resources and ideas with other schools – we’ve really enjoyed our interactions with other schools and classes and, while we’ve learned a lot from them, we also believe that they’ve picked up ideas from us!
• Blogging develops school spirit – it really shines through how much our students love their school!
• Blogging showcases hidden talents – Tommy’s video here is a perfect example of that.
• Blogging is a lovely way to keep in touch with family and friends in other countries – we know we have grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers and sisters reading the blog to find out how school is going. Remember you can read the blog in any language, using the ‘Translate’ option at the side of the page.
• Blogging gives us a platform to suggest ways to help your child’s learning – we provide links and suggestions, particularly through ‘Wednesday for Parents’, to strengthen the home-school links.
• Blogging is a good way to develop safe, appropriate behaviour online. We have a strong emphasis on web safety and we model positive posting and commenting.

Today is a day to celebrate how far we’ve come in a year. We can’t wait to see what next year brings!

As always, you can read all previous ‘Wednesday for Parents’ posts here.