St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

We are very excited to be back completing some STEM challenges! STEM activities give us a chance to practise our Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths skills and to have some fun 😊 Check out our first STEM challenge of the year in Ms. Kane’s class below!

For our first challenge we were given the task of designing of a tin foil boat that could float while holding a number of cube blocks. It appeared to be an easy challenge at first but it required some careful consideration when it came to designing and making the boat so that it could take the weight of multiple cubes.

We planned out our designs carefully and discussed what features our boats needed – sturdy bases, high walls and no holes! We sketched our designs to help keep us on track and then we began to build. When we were happy with our creations, we predicted how many cubes our boats could hold whilst remaining afloat. We poured 2 litres of water into a box and began to test the strength of the tin foil boats. We were surprised that the boats could remain floating with lots more cubes aboard than we had originally estimated.

We then had the chance to make our designs even better and challenged ourselves to make improvements so that the tin foil boats could hold even more cubes. Designing and redesigning is a very important part of every STEM challenge and allows us to improve on our work – just like real life scientists and inventors do.

Most teams chose to create higher walls in the tin foil boats so that as they began to sink, it took a while for water to make it’s way into the designs.

We were very proud of our efforts when we confirmed that every team made adjustments that meant their boats could hold far more cubes the second time.

We discussed gravity and how gravity pulls everything on Earth down. That’s why we don’t float around, like astronauts in space do. We also learned a new term ‘buoyancy’. This refers to the way in which some objects can float on water. When our boats were empty they were buoyant and as we added cubes to the boats, gravity took over as the more powerful force and pulled the boat into the water – sinking it when we added too many cubes. We kept a careful count while observing when this occurred and recorded our scores so that we knew just how many cubes the boat could hold while still floating.

Take a look at our display outside our classroom that explains just how we carried out this design and make STEM challenge.

Welcome to our virtual graduation ceremony for the class of 2021! The slides will be live from 8pm tonight.

During the day today, we held a socially distant ceremony in person for our 6th class – sticking to our pods – with a very small number of staff spread out around the hall. This evening, we invite our families and friends to celebrate with us!

Our mural this year reflects the time we spent on Zoom. Click on each child’s face to view their individual slideshow of photos from their time in St. Peter’s.

Click on the trophy to the left of the mural to watch the presentation of Student of the Year. The trophy on the right is for Sportspeople of the Year and the football represents Mr Vance’s thoughts on the Students vs Teachers competition this year.

The top photo of the class is a slideshow of their time in the school.

The bottom photo is a few videos and photos from this afternoon.

Finally, the graduation balloons will take you to a full video of the ceremony, including the comments on each student and the presentation of certificates.

And a special mention to Leah, Kayleigh and Haylie who song the verse for our song ‘Gotta Be’ by Des’ree!

We hope you enjoy and we wish our students all the best for the future. Please leave a comment congratulating our graduates underneath!

5th Class have been very busy so far in June. Paddy and Mr. Foley set up a fantastic sports day for us with lots of exciting events to take part in. We had lovely warm weather and enjoyed being outside.

First we completed the high jump. Have a look at us soaring to great heights!

Next we competed in some relay races.

We completed an obstacle course

We took some shots in basketball and football.

We ended our activities with a tug of war

Discover Primary Science and Maths 2021 Application

Welcome to our submission for the Discover Primary Science and Maths award for 2021. This is our 16^th year taking part in the Awards, although this school year has been a little different! Once again, we are applying for the Plaque of STEM Excellence. This award is given to schools that carry out extensive work in science, technology, engineering and maths, all of which are very important in St. Peter’s.

This is the 7th year that we have had Junior and Senior Infants taking part in the award! It is great to see the young scientists have so much fun learning about science and maths. Each year we try to put an even bigger focus on STEM across the school, with a whole school approach helping us achieve even more in this area. This has also meant, due to current circumstances, that we have broadened our scope to encourage STEM at home, which has been both challenging and exciting.

You can read all about it and see the evidence below. It has been great to see the improvements we can make towards helping our school incorporating STEM as a way of thinking, rather than as a stand-alone subject.

All of the pupils are seeing that STEM is about the skills required to learn science, technology and mathematics, and how engineering and design processes and principles are used to achieve an outcome. As students of STEM, we identify a problem. We then need to create possible solutions to the problems, which we can then go and test.

Yet again, a huge amount of work has gone into this application. Every single class in the whole school has taken part, so a big well done to all the pupils and teachers! For the ninth year in a row, we are using our blog to submit our award and to link back to our activities that have taken place during the year.

Step 1: Science

For this step, we carried out hands-on science investigations under the four different strands in classes throughout the school, and home. We also tried to include maths in these investigations where possible, linking in with Step 4.

• Energy and Forces: This is always a popular strand as it really excites the children with fun experiments to engage in. Check out the Balloon Rockets and rockets made by 3^rd class as part of science week, learn about space, catapults and parachutes with 2^nd class or floating and sinking with 1^st class.
• Living Things: Being situated in a coastal town in the Garden of Ireland class love to learn about the sea and nature. Here 5^th class looked at the Sea Creatures and the importance of keeping our seas safe from pollution and plastics while Senior Infants learned all about flowers and caterpillars and gardening with their Aistear theme of the Garden Centre.
• Environmental Awareness and Care:  

Learning all about environmental care 5^th class looked at oil pollution and experimented to see which materials are more absorbent for cleaning oil. Ms. Kane’s class looked at Eco Racers and designed fuel-less cars to see how far they could travel.

• Materials and Change: 

Junior Infants used magnets to explore materials that are magnetic. 3^rd Class Mummified Tomatoes while learning about Egypt and during school closures Ms. Lohan set whole school STEM challenges. One of our favourites was making Homemade Ice-Cream.

We love an opportunity to undertake STEM projects and were lucky enough to undertake a number of Science projects before school closures this year. 6^th Class took part in Reelife Science and produced the film Nettles. All classes took part in Science Week including Ms. Kane’s Class learning all about coronavirus and won an ESB Curiosity Box. 5^th Class took on a Space theme and 4^th class looked at transport and hot air balloons. 

Step 2: Technology

The second step in the application is ensuring that technology was used by our pupils. As a previous winner of the Junior Spider Awards, technology has become a part of every-day life in St. Peter’s. We were also awarded the Digital School of Distinction award, which showcased the effort and time we put in incorporating technology into our daily school lives.

We believe this is true for children at all levels. Mr. Kinsella’s Junior Infant class have been have loved early programming activities with Beebots while Ms. Wemyss’ 5^th class have been using Lego Wedo a lot this year. They have loved getting to play with the kits and programming them and engaging with the interactive lessons using the Lego Wedo software. You can read all about their engagement with designing, building and coding the Lego Wedo robots or building snow ploughs to clear marshmallow snow.

We see the importance of integrating technology across the curriculum with pupils using cameras, tablets, animoto, and the blog, as well as apps such as Class Dojo and Twitter, to showcase the work that they have been doing during the course of the year. Some examples include Kahoot Quizzes, researching projects, and target boards in Maths.

With using technology regularly we recognise the importance of online safety and marked this when we celebrated Safer Internet Day through home learning this year.

As you can see from our submission, we have continued to implement technology in our day-to-day teaching and learning, even at home, with maths and science at the forefront of this. You can check out all of our tweets from the year @stpetersbray!

Step 3: Engineering

For the third step of our application for the DPSM Plaque of STEM Excellence, we have had a big focus on the Design and Make element of science. Our staff have worked previously in conjunction with St. Patrick’s College regarding professional development in STEM. A big part of this focused on the Design and Make process, and helped us make sure STEM was an integral part of our engineering activities.

We like to start our engineers early and Ms. Conway’s Senior Infants began with building Lego Castles this year. Ms. Meaney’s 1^st class designed and built their own dog kennels. 2^nd Class made and raced their own Rubber Band Racers. 3^rd class tried their own engineering challenges too and constructed their own biscuit houses biscuit houses and Knex Rockets and we were very excited that while exploring the theme of space Ms. Kane’s class tweeted about building their Robot Arm which was liked by Commander Chris Hadfield.

Step 4: Maths

Throughout our Science investigations, all classes looked to incorporate Maths as much as possible and like opportunities to explore concepts in a fun way like celebrating Maths Week in the school. Here Junior Infants used patterns to colour their own  Snakes and Ladders game and made Paper Aeroplanes with the help of Maths TV.

We love the chance to explore real world Maths whenever we can and one example of this is baking in Ms. Kane’s class focusing on measuring ingredients and timing their dishes.

With department recommendations this year of using open spaces and getting out of the classroom when possible, classes took advantage of this with 2D Shape Hunt in Senior Infants, outdoor patterns in Ms. Cronin’s 2nd class and a Maths Hunt in 1^st Class.

Integrating technology with maths is an important skill and application of this can be seen by 5th Class using tablets to work out their Black Friday discounts on class Dojo prizes.

Step 5: STEM Showcase

As a school we know how important it is for students to present their work to an audience, especially with all the hard work put into STEM initiatives by pupils and staff. We always love taking part in initiatives like Science Blast and were featured in April last year on RTE’s Nationwide Programme to discuss our history of engagement with primary science events through the RDS. This gave us a chance to showcase a couple of strategies we use to promote STEM throughout the school. Typically, classes present their learning during Assembly or at our own showcases but this year was obviously a little different.

Learning from home has challenged us to come up with new ways of using technology to assist distant learning for our pupils. Class used Study Ladder to set online science tasks for pupils and Ms. Lohan set whole school STEM challenges through our school blo such as looking at Magic using pressure with students sending in their own results  or featuring walking paper animals with some fun pupil designs.

We couldn’t include all our STEM activities as our teachers and pupils work so hard throughout the year on this but we hope you enjoyed reading a few examples from our submission for the SFI Discover Primary Science and Maths Award!

First class were so lucky to get a visit from Bex to help us think more about creativity.

Firstly, Bex made this gorgeous ‘Creativitree’ with us to get us thinking about creativity:

If you look closely you can see how we are creative:

Bex then helped us to make tinfoil butterflies on her next visit:

During the week 1st class were learning about hot air balloons, we decided to make our construction of a hot air balloon more creative by all making our own unique baskets to put onto them. Take a look at our constructions:

We are really looking forward to learning more from Bex soon!

Ancient Egypt

We spent the month of April learning all about Ancient Egypt. We learned about Tutankhamen, the boy king, all about the pyramids and how they used to mummify their kings as they believed in the afterlife.

Our favourite lesson was one of our Science lessons which involved mummifying a tomato. First, we learned all bout the mummifying process – removing the insides, cleaning the insides, then filling them up with natron (salt). Then, we applied all this new knowledge to our tomatoes. We cut out all the guts and cleaned the insides and then packed it tight with our own special natron. We left the tomatoes untouched for 2 weeks to see what they would look like. We also left a tomato that we didn’t mummify as our control to compare what they would look like. Have a look at the pictures below to see for yourself – the one without the salt went completely mouldy (white and green), the one with the natron remained completely un-mouldy!

We also completed a lot of art based on Ancient Egypt including sunset backgrounds with camel silhouettes, Egyptian jewelry and turning ourselves into pharaohs. We also wrote our names in hieroglyphics!

One Book, One Community

This month we took part in the One book, One Community initiative. We read the book “The boy who harnessed the wind” by
William Kamkwamba which is a picture book based on William’s true life story of how when he was just fourteen years old he figured out how to bring electricity to his village by building a windmill.

We then spent time learning about wind turbines and how they work. Finally, we made our own wind turbine from cardboard, a pencil, string and a paper cup. We used a hairdryer as our ‘wind’ but soon realised cardboard wasn’t working as we thought it might have been too heavy so we changed the material from cardboard to paper and it worked!

Wellness Week

During the last week before midterm, we celebrated Wellness week. This included the themes of kindness, positivity and healthy bodies and mind.

Over the course of the week we took part in sports, had hot chocolate and biscuits, enjoyed a drumming workshop, visited 6th classes healthy body exhibition and ended the week with and ice cream van visiting the school!! It was a fantastic week!

In Senior Infants, we have been learning all about life cycles!

Before the Easter Holidays, senior infants took in our own class caterpillars. We wanted to watch them on their journey from caterpillars into butterflies! They grew from eggs and were caterpillars when we got them.

We kept them in our room and each table looked after them each day. When we came back from the Easter Holidays, we noticed that the caterpillars had made their chrysalides! 👏

We put them into our butterfly garden and then waited for the next two weeks for them to turn in to butterflies …!

Over the next two weeks, the butterflies came out of the cocoons! We left them in our butterfly gardens for a day and then set them free into the wild!

Senior Infants had so much fun getting involved with all of the amazing activities organised for wellness week. Check out what they got up to below…

At the start of the week, we read ‘Have You Filled a Bucket Today?’
We thought of all the different things that our friends and families to do ‘fill our buckets’. Then we planned all of the kind, helpful things that we could do to ‘fill’ other people’s buckets too!

We learned so much from the brilliant ‘Body Fuel’ exhibition that sixth class put together! We looked at the food pyramid and discussed what food would help our body to stay healthy and strong! 🍍🍒🍇 We also read through the great healthy recipes that Ms.Kane’s class had created. Maybe we can try some over the mid-term break! 🍳🥘

We were very excited when an ice cream van came to school!🍨 Lucky us! 😁

We love music in senior infants and it always makes us smile! We were very happy to get to play the drums for the day! 🥁

And we even got to relax with some hot chocolate and biscuits! What a week 😊

We loved taking part in Wellness Week. It gave us a great chance to discuss our feelings and what we enjoy doing to keep our minds and bodies healthy. We also shared some tips with each other about looking after our wellbeing in the future!

We started the week with some Monday Meditation and found that this gave us a chance to breathe before beginning a new week. It’s important to take some time each day to do this. We also thought about some things in our lives that we’re grateful for and completed a ‘Gratitude Jar’ activity.

We also discussed how important exercise is for keeping our minds and bodies healthy. Even a short 10 minute walk each day can clear our head and allows us time to focus on just the here and now. It’s a quick and easy way to look after our wellbeing. We also took the opportunity to play a game of hockey together to test out how we felt after exercise – we noticed we had more energy which was super!

Next on our list of activities to celebrate Wellness Week, we decided to cook a healthy snack for ourselves! Cooking/baking is our favourite time of the week and our quesadilla recipe went down a treat! They were so easy to make – we added cheese, scallions, ham/ chicken to our wrap and they were ready to eat within minutes! They were delicious and we love to learn quick and easy recipes, with simple ingredients that we can recreate at home. Huge thanks to Mrs. Kelly who always has the best recipes!

We also really loved the Body Fuel display we got to attend in the hall that was organised by 6th class! We had great fun learning about healthy alternatives to some of our favourite snacks, looking at their amazing food pyramid for information and taking part in the word scramble! Huge thanks to 6th for creating such informative displays and interactive activities! We learned a lot!

We also felt it was important to share some tips with each other about staying positive and being aware of our own wellness. The amazing positivitree in the school porch gave us a great opportunity to share and read some great positive messages that really lifted our moods! Huge thanks to Michelle and Elaine for the super bright corridors in school too!

Our week ended with some lovely treats we all really enjoyed! Huge thanks so the breakfast club for the delicious pancakes (our favourite!) We also absolutely loved the ice – cream truck that arrived to our school yard as a special surprise for everyone! Part of looking after our wellness is having a nice treat from time to time and this was definitely a great way to end our week!

We really enjoyed taking part in Wellness Week and will definitely practise some of our newly formed habits more regularly now!