St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

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!

This month in 4th Class we have been taking part in activities each week for Anti- Bullying Month in St. Peters.

We each wrote a different act of kindness and then we chose a random act of kindness each day.

We designed and displayed anti – bullying posters!

It is antibullying month in St. Peter’s. In 5th class, we are trying to be the ‘I’ in kind!

We also designed anti-bullying posters to show we will stand up to bullying!

It’s anti-bullying month in St. Peters and we have been learning about ways in which we can lift each other up. We created this art display based on the film ‘Up’ using a variety of materials. We wrote positive notes in the balloons which remind us every day to be kind to each other!

Junior Infants were very excited about Science Week. This week, along with STEM for Fun we got to explore magnets and how they work. Early in the week we explored magnetism. We talked about what magnets are and watched a short video on magnetism. We then investigated things that were magnetic by testing our magnets out around the school and yard outside.

During Aistear we got to explore magnets and magnetic objects more. We used magnets to test items that might be magnetic and categorise items that were magnetic and non magnetic.

Finally at the end of the week we looked at a group of items as a class and use our prediction sheets to draw and try to predict which items were magnetic and which were not. We then tested these out to see if our predictions were correct.

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!