St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

After our nice Christmas break, Senior Infants came back refreshed and ready for jam packed few weeks!

We started learning all about the airport and airplanes in Aistear. Our role play corner became an airplane which we made passports to board, of course. We discussed who a Pilot was and what there on the plane was.

We built airplanes in our construction corner and use small runway cut outs so that they could pick up speed before lift off.

In our Art area, we spent lots of time making a plane picture from clothes pegs, lollipop sticks. We painted our materials and glued them together. Then, we made clouds from cotton wool so it looked like our planes were flying in the air.

In Maths, we have started learning about weight. We weighed different items in the classroom, with a bucket balance, to find which were heavier and which were lighter. We have also been learning all about the number 8 this month!

Finally, we made our goals for 2022. We drew pictures of activities we wanted to start doing, things in school we wanted to get better at, and some even drew pictures helping out at home more!

This month we learning all about procedural writing. We have been reading lots of recipes and instructions on how to play board games to help us identify the different features of this genre.

Baking is one of our favourite activities and we took this as a great opportunity to make a delicious lemon drizzle cake and to write the recipe down so we can share it here with everyone 👍👩‍🍳 We hope you find it easy to follow and enjoy! Be sure to let us know if you try it! 🍰

Ingredients:

210g of self – raising flour

1/2 tsp of baking powder

200g of margarine/ butter

200g of caster sugar

3 eggs

1 lemon

100g icing sugar

1tsp water

Method:

1. Measure out 200g margarine/ butter and and 200g of caster sugar and mix together in a large bowl.
2. When the mixture is light and fluffy, add in the eggs, 1 at a time and keep mixing.
3. Lift the sieve up high and sift in the self – raising flour and baking powder.
4. Mix with a wooden spoon to keep it light and fluffy.
5. Juice and zest the lemon. Add in half the lemon juice and half the zest, reserving the rest for the icing.
6. Add your batter to a fully lined baking tin and oven bake at 180 degrees C for 40 minutes.
7. When cooled, squeeze some lemon over the cake.
8. To make the icing, sift icing sugar and mix with a teaspoon of water. Add in the remainder of your lemon juice and zest.
9. Drizzle the icing over the cake and wait until it sets before cutting.
10. Enjoy 😀

We hope you find this recipe easy to follow. We’d love to hear from you if you try it at home.

Here is our baking in action:

We love to integrate technology into the classroom whenever we can. Children are so adept at using IT now they are practically teaching us. We We love to use the school tablets to enhance our learning, particularly during Maths stations.

We use the IWB daily in the class and children love to get a chance to play games in literacy and numeracy activities.

We teach basic programming throughout the school and love to get a chance to use the Beebots to teach early programming skills.

The longest Snowman:

We divided into groups of three. Each group got 6 sheets of paper, 30 cm of sellotape and 2 pipe cleaners. A classroom timer of 12 minutes was set on the board. The aim of the challenge was that each group had to make the longest snowman they could in the time given. Take a look at the different ways we made our snowmen:

Christmas Catapults:

We decided on an easy structure to follow to make our catapults. All we needed was a spoon, lollipop sticks and elastic bands. They turned out amazing!

When they were made we tested them in loads of challenges- who could launch their catapult the furthest, who could make it to the end of the hall first catapulting snowballs and who could catapult a snowball onto certain spots first. It was so much fun!

Santa’s sleigh and workshop- Lego edition.

1st class were given the chance to make Santa’s sleigh or Santa’s workshop using Lego. We made some amazing structures!

The month of December brought a lot of sweet treats into our classroom.

We started the month by baking these gorgeous marshmallow-crispie cupcakes. take a look:

We also got creative using Nutella and biscuits to make our very own reindeer biscuits. They were delicious.

One of our favorite parts of the month was getting hot chocolate and chocolate lollipops delivered to the classroom by Mr Vance and Karen.

In 2nd Class we have been exploring Christmas Traditions in Ireland and in other countries. We had great discussions about what the children were looking forward to for the New Year and Christmas Day.

We created Christmas lanterns – with our Christmas wishes in them – and Christmas wreaths in preparation!

Welcome to the St. Peter’s Christmas Play 2021! This year, our classes have been really busy putting together fantastic videos of the students singing, dancing and acting for you. We really hope you enjoy the show!

We made Santa sleighs out of Lego last week in 5th class. We tested our sleighs for speed, safety and distance! We also tested to see if they would stay together after a crash test!

We had so much fun!

We had a busy week last week making sleighs out of Lego 🛷 we tested their speed, how many pushes they needed to travel 6 metres and we did a crash test! The children really enjoyed it 😊

With all the excitement of Christmas we thought we would do a festive experiment. Our questions –Which liquid will cause our candy cane to disappear the fastest?

To conduct our experiment, we needed: 4 plastic cups, 4 candy canes, vinegar, warm water, milk and cold water.

We labelled our 4 clear cups and then filled the cups with warm water, cold water, milk and vinegar.

Then, we made predictions. The vast majority thought the warm water would melt the candy cane the quickest!

We put one candy cane in each cup and watched to see what would happen.

Within 2 minutes all three candy canes were starting to turn the liquids pink or red. It was definitely magic!

We observed the four cups and compared the reactions. After break, we had our results and we could determine if our predictions were correct or correct.

The cup with the warm water was the fastest liquid to make the candy cane dissolve.

The vinegar cup was the first liquid to remove all the red from the candy cane.

The cold water and milk removed the colour and disappeared but more slowly than other two liquids.

Next, we recorded our observations and results. We learned lots of new vocabulary words such as dissolve, prediction, result.

By the next morning, all the candy canes had dissolved into the liquids.

Even more interestingly and in the interest of science we discovered later that the quickest way to make a candy cane disappear was to eat it!!!