St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

We conducted three experiments in 5th class for Science Week 2021.

Experiment 1: To investigate the influence of different liquids on a hard boiled egg shell that will act as tooth enamel.

We placed four hard boiled eggs into bowls with either milk, apple juice, vinegar and coca-cola. We left the eggs to sit in the liquid for the duration of the week before removing them.

We were surprised that the apple juice egg looked worse than the coca-cola egg! The egg that was in the vinegar was shriveled up and wrinkly!

Experiment 2: We investigated the growth of bacteria on bread.

First, we picked different people to help with the experiment. One person washed their hands in the sink before placing a slice of bread into a zip-lock bag. Another person sanitised their hands before placing in a different slice of bread. Then, we had someone without washing or sanitising their hands to place bread into a different bag. Finally we took a slice outside into the yard and placed it on the ground before it went into a bag, and another on the classroom floor.

We allowed the bread to hang in the bags on the wall for a week. Here are the results.

We were surprised there was not as much bacteria growth on the bread from the yard!

Experiment 3: Mixing substances: Coca-cola and Milk

First we got a bottle of coke and took off the label so we could see the contents clearly. Then, we slowly added milk to the bottle of coca-cola. We mixed it up and let it sit for a week. We expected the coke to turn clear as the milk is supposed to attach itself to the acid in the cola, giving it a clear look.

From our results, you can see that the coca-cola did not go completely clear, but we were very impressed with what we saw!

STEM4Fun

As well as our classroom experiments, we took part in STEM4Fun in the hall. We worked in groups to take part in different STEM activities.

At one of the stations, we had to try to make a Pringle Wheel! We all tried really hard but only one group succeeded!

Well done 5th class!

STEM activity 1:

We started of Science week by seeing if there was any link between our favorite colour and our favorite taste.

We began by making a pictogram using gummy bears to show the votes of the classes favorite colours. Take a look:

After this, we tasted some fresh jellies and decided on which one was our favorite to taste. We talked about different ways we could make this graph and decided that a block graph was the quickest. Here are our results:

We were surprised that there was no link between our taste and favorite color as we had predicted there would be.

STEM activity 2:

We then decided we wouldn’t waste the left over jellies so we did another experiment. We discussed what might happen a jelly if we left it in water overnight. We chose 3 jellies and put them in a cup of water and we also left another 3 jellies in cup without water so we could use them to compare our results against in the morning. Here are some of our predictions:

We were shocked to see how big the jellies we left in water grew overnight. We learn all about ‘osmosis’. Take a look at what we saw:

November has been Anti-Bullying month in St. Peter’s. Each week for the month Junior Infants have been engaging in activities to learn more about what bullying is and what we can do if we or someone we know is being bullied. We discussed and watched videos on different bullying scenarios and how people might feel in different situations.

We talked about how as individuals we can achieve success but working together as a team and class we can be be even better.
We added some team work skills into our lessons like Cross the Arctic in PE and created a colourful collage to show what we can do when we work together.

Thankfully Bully isn’t a problem for us in St. Peter’s. In Junior Infants we have been working really hard on getting along, sharing and being a team since the start of the year.

We had a lot of fun in our Aistear stations this month! Our role play corner was turned into a potion lab. There we made potions with lots of different ingredients including fingers, eyeballs, spiders and lots more!

We drew our own magic potion ingredients in a different station and then could ‘make’ them in our cauldrons at the role play area.

We had Bike Day this month which was lots of fun. We all followed the course that was set out and showed off just how good we were at riding our bikes!

Senior Infants learnt how to partition numbers this month. They spent a lot of time exploring numbers 1 to 5. They came up with different ways to make 5.

We have been learning all about Autumn since we started back after summer and this month we had our own Autumn table. We brought in different items that we associated with Autumn for our table such as conkers, leaves, pine cones etc.

We had a lot of fun carving pumpkins and dressing up on the last day!

First class had great fun during Maths Week trying different challenges that really got us thinking. We voted on our favorite challenge, take a look:

Legs Legs: There are dogs and ducks in a garden. There are ten legs in the garden. Draw a picture of the animals that are in the garden. Take a look at our gardens:

Halloween:

We took part in loads of different activities to celebrate Halloween. Take a look at a few of our pictures!

We have our anti-bullying month in the school next month. Each child will be given a badge with the image above on it and will do lessons in relation to anti-bullying throughout the month. We also have a range of colourful canvas posters around the school with anti-bullying messages on them. The badge contains words in relation to anti-bullying which are explained below.

Compassion- Pity and concern for someone if something bad happens
Acceptance- We’re all different and we need to appreciate this
Friendship- Treat others the way you would like to be treated
Respect- You don’t have to be best friends with everyone but you do need to respect everyone
Kindness- Try to be kind to people who need your kindness the mostC

Check out some of the numeracy activities Junior Infants have been getting up to this month with patterns and numicons.

We have been busy baking and cooking again this year and love learning lots of different skills during these lessons. We are very lucky that Mrs. Kelly has the BEST recipes for us to try and it’s definitely our favourite time of the week! So far this year we have made homemade sausage rolls, scones, apple pie, jam tarts and garlic bread.

Through baking, we learn lots of important life skills, as well having the chance to practise some Maths concepts in real life. For example, every time we bake we get the chance to measure out ingredients, estimate how long each recipe will take to cook, time how long our dishes need in the oven and at what temperature and calculate how much each dish costs to cook. We have also started to compare the price of home cooked meals to those items we might buy in the shop for a quick breakfast or lunch fix and found out that home cooked meals are much more reasonably priced (as well being absolutely delicious 😋)

Mrs. Kelly shows us that it’s possible to bake/ cook any of our favourite dishes and we all agreed that our homemade sausage rolls this year were top notch – some even rated them 10/10! 💯😁

After every baking lesson we have the chance to practise our recount skills by recalling exactly what steps we took to make our dish. We also get the opportunity to practise our procedural writing skills when we record our recipes. If anyone needs to know how to make any of our delicious recipes so far, just ask! We’d be happy to share 🙂

Presentation is also key 👍 Mrs. Kelly helps us to present our final product in a very professional looking way! We had great reviews from our families and friends about how delicious our baking tasted. A huge thanks to Mrs. Kelly for all her help and for making our baking/cooking lessons such an enjoyable part of school!

We have been learning about the environment in 6th class. We have put together a podcast with some tips and tricks to help everyone to be more environmentally aware. Let us know if you have any questions, enjoy!

https://anchor.fm/caoimhe-lohan8/episodes/Tips-to-help-our-planet-e189oo8

And just like that we’re back! Senior Infants have been getting up to a lot this month and settling in to their new class! Have a read of what we’ve been doing.

Teddy Bear Picnic 🐻

Senior Infants were invited to attend a Teddy Bear’s Picnic. This was to represent the lovely display that was created by a man in the local area which included a lot of teddy bears. To top it off, RTE2’s News2Day came along and recorded it all. The following week, we watched ourselves back on TV! There was a lot of excitement as you can imagine! 😁

Aistear 🏘️🧱🎨

We had a lot of fun in Aistear this month, we learned all about our school and our homes. In the roleplay area, we pretended to be Karen in the office and took on the roll of other people working in the school. We also played in our house with our kitchen and used our imagination and created yummy meals and set the table and of course cleaned up when everyone was finished.

Other Aistear areas we had fun in were with construction, planning and building our own houses and we learned all about our senses – particularly touch and all about our fingerprints and how they are unique to us. We painted our fingers and left our finger prints on a black page in bright colours!!

Our Sounds and Letter formation 📝

We spent a lot of time revising our sounds from last year and practicing our letter formation. We used play dough to create the letter ‘t’, have a look below.👏

We have had a great start back to the school year!! 😄