St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

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!!!

We had a great month in senior infants this month – we were learning all about The Sports Shop in Aistear. We played in our ‘Lifestyle’ Sports shop during our role play area, designed and made our own GAA jerseys from different fabrics in our art station. We designed the layout of our own sports shop using large Jenga blocks and designed our own obstacle course and then made it from LEGO.

We celebrated Science week during November. We carried out an experiment in class – we added gummy bears to water to see what would happen – they grew larger! We also got to spend time in the hall doing different experiments in stations, they were very cool. The stations included Bee-bots, LEGO, making bubbles, making paper aeroplanes and making the tallest tower possible from plastic cups.

Finally, this month we celebrated Anti Bullying month in school. Senior Infants spent a lot of time learning about what bullying is (repeated, unwanted behaviour that is on purpose). We talked about ways to be a buddy, not a bully. Then Senior Infants gave their thoughts on what they felt bullying was to them.

We were delighted to take part in STEM for Fun recently in the school hall. STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths. Different stations were set up around the hall all containing elements of STEM.

Junior Infants really loved the different challenges. They were tasked with constructing the highest tower they could out of paper cups and giant playing cards.

They also had to make their own paper planes and measure to see how far they travelled counting in steps.

It was very exciting getting to explore programming with Beebots, trying to input the correct instructions so the beebot could escape the maze.

They experimented with making friction bubbles using soapy water on a flat surface and almost made a bubble within a bubble (unfortunately we could figure out how to keep them from bursting)!

Finally, they had to help the poor Gingerbread Man cross the river by designing and making a Lego Bridge.

We had great fun and can’t wait for the next time. Special thanks to Ms. Whyte and Ms. Sexton for running the stations.

This month in first class we have learnt all about what bullying is. We know that bullying can:

• hurt your body
• hurt your feelings
• damage your things

We began the month by looking closely at how we can be better friends and took the chance to interview people in our class we wanted to become better friends with over the month. We have been encouraged by PAP which allowed us to win points for showing kindness.

We continued the month by learning about ytpes of bullying and the effects it can have on people. We know the best way to stop bullying is to tell! Take a look at our tell song: h

https://vimeo.com/649645054

Finally we were all rewarded with an Anti-Bullying badge for combatting bullying in our school!

Congratulations to our two winners of the Bray Drugs Task Force art competition who are pictured below. We’re very proud of you

As you will all know by now, our school is participating in the Creative Schools programme.

We are excited to be moving to the next stage of the programme after working hard to collect information from students, parents and staff about what creativity means to each group, how we already take part in creative activities and what we can do to improve our school’s approach to creativity.

A huge thank you to all for your responses, they have been really helpful in deciding how we should move forward in the programme!

Our students are currently considering the possibility of creating an outdoor learning space in our school. It’s very important that the ‘student voice’ leads our new initiative as this space will be an area for their learning to take place.

Here are some considerations that our students are taking to account:

If you have time to discuss some ideas with your children at home or any ideas that you think could work in an outdoor learning space, please don’t hesitate to get involved 😊

We are looking forward to seeing our ideas come to life over the next few months!

We had great fun celebrating Science Week this year! Science is one of our favourite subjects and we love taking part in STEM activities!

We loved taking part in STEM for Fun in the hall this year and had the chance to try lots of different activities including creating paper planes and racing them, programming Bee Bots, building a circle using Pringles, building the tallest tower using paper and using Lego to create a ‘vehicle of the future’.

In our classroom we discussed ideas that we hope Science will help us answer in the future and had a look at the ‘Creating our Future’ website https://creatingourfuture.ie/. These ideas included making sure there’s enough food in the world for everyone to eat, the possibility of teleporting, how robots might help us with homework and whether holidays to space will be a possibility for everyone. We discussed ideas in history that might have seemed impossible without Science such as electric cars, flying aeroplanes and mobile phones.

We watched coverage of COP 26 and were most impressed by Sir David Attenborough’s address to the delegates. We discussed the devastating effects of climate change on the world and what we must do to reverse these changes.

We love taking part in Design and Make activities and were delighted to use the PDST and Dr. Niamh Shaw and the Ark’s resource about ‘Treasuring our Earth’. We began by reading a short story about a bird and 3 eggs at risk from a forest fire. We remembered the awful forest fires we had seen on the news from around the world and knew the bird and her eggs would be in trouble if they didn’t move quickly.

We began to design a zipline that they could use to safely move from dangerous trees/ branches to safer ones. We looked at some videos of ziplines online and even found out that some children in the world travel to school via ziplines! We discussed the fact that angle of the zipline is important and will probably be in shape of an acute angle. Michael pointed out that it shouldn’t be too steep as the nest and the bird want to travel safely to a new branch. We used some elastic string (used to wrap presents) as the zipline, as we felt it was the right texture to allow the nest and eggs to move along smoothly. We created the eggs and nest using cardboard.

We tried lots of different materials to carry the nest and eggs safely from the ‘top branch’ to the lower ‘safer branch’, including wool, pipe cleaners and string. None of these materials facilitated a smooth journey. Liz suggested that we try a paper clip and we were delighted when this allowed the precious eggs to travel safely. We had made a brake system out of a cotton bud but luckily the angle of our zipline meant we didn’t need to use it. Luke made sure that the eggs ‘landed’ safely by adding a ‘cushion’ of pipe cleaners to the end point of the zipline.

This design and make activity included lots of science, maths and engineering as well as technology which helped us to decided on the design of our zipline. A great chance for us to practise lots of different skills!