St Peter’s Post #5

A quiet week on the blog this week, but certainly not a quiet week in St Peter’s. We’ve lots coming up in the next few weeks and this week was definitely a preparation week – lots of singing, science and sketches. That’s not to say that we don’t have plenty of news for you – if you missed anything during the week, you’ve come to the right place!

Here are the headlines from the week:

• The weeks started in the best possible way, with the return of everyone’s favourite chicken, Nugget. He mightn’t have been so excited to return if he was a turkey! 32 sleeps to the big day!
• Speaking of Christmas – 2nd and 3rd made lanterns this week for the turning on of the lights in Bray. Check out their beautiful work here!
• A couple of weeks ago, we showed you the excellent ‘Irish history in 6 minutes’ with Manny Man (aka John Ruddy). 5th class had the fantastic opportunity to interview him – you can check out the blog post here.
• Roots of Empathy returned this week. Last year, Roots of Empathy was a huge success – you can read all the posts on the blog about it here.
• Ms Brennan presented at the NALA Family Learning Conference this week – she spoke to other schools about using blogs and technology to engage parents and students. Ms Sexton helped out in the afternoon with the workshop. NALA also run a great website called ‘Help My Kid Learn’ – our ‘Wednesday for Parents’ post discusses it in more detail.
• One of our after school clubs this week, Scratch Club, used Blockly to learn how to problem-solve, using code. Read all about it here.

In other news:

• Preparations for our Christmas play got underway this week. The auditions have been held, anyone who wants a speaking part has declared their interest, the extra parts to the script are in the editing process and singing rehearsals kicked off yesterday! All getting very excited – we look forward to seeing parents, friends and families for the big show on Wednesday 18th December (not even 4 weeks away!)
• Mini-Scientist preparations continue to gather pace – reminder that the showcase takes place on December 3rd. We’ll let you know all the details next week!
• Mr Kinsella, LukeMc, AaronJ, Andrei and Ameesh have been busy working on an engineering project with K’NEX – we can’t wait to see their work at the Mini-Scientist showcase!
• Don’t forget that 2nd class have their ‘Do this in memory’ Mass this Sunday at 11.30 – they’ve been working really hard to prepare with Ms Brennan!
• 4th class were busy learning about Microsoft Word this week and they tweeted their progress from the school library. Tweet of the week has to go to Mason: ‘I learned how to make parts of my writing bold – Mason #imnotbold!’ Thanks also to Alex and Caoilynn’s mum, Michelle, who is always so supportive on Twitter – she sent us an article about what Microsoft Windows looked like back in the 1980’s!
• Our Student Council representatives got very cool new badges this week!
• Singing Club started learning the moves for Hallelujah Choir this week.
• Ms Sugrue represented the school at the Youth Mental Health Seminar – there were some excellent speakers there and we were delighted to attend. Thanks to Bray Partnership and the excellent Be Well Bray group for organising it.
• 5th class started working on their Electric Paint project. By Friday, we had 4 robots working perfectly and we hope to have the rest in the same state by Tuesday! Ois and AaronG showed off their work to 2nd class, who were extremely impressed!
• Welcome also to Joan Daly Martin, from Canada, who runs the ‘Roots of Empathy’ programme. She left some very supportive comments on our Roots of Empathy posts this week!
• The answer this week was New York? Did you guess the question? Mr Foley’s ‘Big Question’ board continues…
• Leon from 5th completed his superb book review on ‘Stay where you are and then leave’ by John Boyne – it’s being published by South County Dublin Libraries next week and then we’ll post the link up here.
• 2nd class started reading ‘Esio Trot’ this week and they tried out backwards writing from the book. Well done 2nd class for working so hard on your reading! Can’t wait to hear your podcast!

You can find all past issues of the St Peter’s Post here. See you next week!