St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

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! 👏

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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!

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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! 🍳🥘

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

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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! 🥁

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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!

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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!

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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!

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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!

Last week we celebrated wellness week in 1st class. We enjoyed loads of activities that relaxed us and made us feel better, have a look at some of the things we did!

We started off the week by looking at different feelings, we discussed how we could feel better if we were feeling down, anxious or stressed and we tried these activities out during the week. Some of these activities included the following:

1. Bubble Breathing- Taking deep breathes and acting like your blowing bubbles (or actually blowing them!) is a great way to calm down.

2. Healthy eating- It is important to give your body healthy and nutritious foods to keep it feeling well. We went to a lovely healthy eating exhibition made by 6th class where we went on food hunts, unscrambled words and learnt about the food pyramid!

3. Exercise- this is a great way to make your body feel better. We talked about all the different types of exercise we can do. Lucky for us we have the King of obstacle courses in our school which means we got to make our body feel better by trying out one he made for us- thanks Paddy Mullen! We ended the course with a lie down listening to peaceful music to relax us.

4. Music- Its great to be creative and do things you love to keep well. We were so lucky to get to go to a drumming workshop where we learnt different rhythm’s and melodies.

5. One of our favorite activities was making ooblek water which was a great experiment seeing it change from solid to liquid. Everyone had a smile on their face during this activity!

6. Stressballs- squeezing and making these relieved all our tension and stress and also made for a great reminder of our well being week!

7. TREAT YO SELF- we ended the week with two lovely days of treats- hot chocolate and biscuits AND an ice-cream from the ice-cream van. I mean how can these two things not make you feel good!

This week was fantastic! We explored lots of different ways to take care of our bodies and our mind. We did some fabulous activities too and had lots of fun!

Music & Mindfulness

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We did lots of lovely Mindful Art. We learned that doing simple colouring and drawing is a great way to relax our minds.

Sports Day 🏀

Fun Friday

To end our week we feel so lucky to have had a visit from an Ice-Cream truck to our front yard. We all enjoyed some yummy ice-creams!

Welcome to our final update to our whole school story!

Well done to all those who took part over the last number of weeks, it’s been fantastic to see all your submissions being added together to create our own story, accompanied with lots of superb illustrations!

The final question we needed to answer was: ‘what will our rabbit wish for’?

Check out the brilliant end to our story here!

What a fantastic story! Huge well done to all involved. We hope you enjoy reading!

Plastic Pollution in our Oceans

Since 3rd class returned to school last month, after 3 months of at home learning, they were eager to get going again and to learn lots of new information.

We started learning about procedural writing in literacy ✏️ As a whole class, we wrote a detailed procedure of how to make a paper aeroplane. Then, we followed the instructions to see if they made sense and if we could make an aeroplane from what we had written and of course tested the planes outside. ✈️

Later in the week, we wrote about how to make chocolate nests 🍫. We wrote our instructions and then followed them to make the nests, just in time for Easter. Our finishing touches were an egg and a little chick on top 🐥.

We created beautiful daffodil drawings, all using the same technique but all looking completely different and unique 💐.

We also created these lovely jars which we sponged paint on to create an Easter print on the outside. We created little Easter signs for and put small Easter eggs in them 🐇🥚.

Finally, we enjoyed a pizza party that we won from spinning the wheel during lock down 🍕.

We had great fun taking part in our recent STEM challenge. We have been learning about climate change, sustainability and also celebrated Engineers Week 2021. To bring all of our recent learning together we decided to make our own eco racers, test how they operate and race them to see what makes them travel fast and in a straight line. We think eco racers might be the future of car design because their friendly to the environment, not using fuel to operate and can be cheap to make!

Before we got building, we planned our design based on the materials we knew we would be working with. It’s important to take time to consider the design of your project and ask questions about what we wanted to find out. Planning also gives us a chance to make adjustments to our designs and ask each other for help and suggestions should we need it.

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After we planned the design of our eco racers we took a look at the materials we had to work with. They were simple and we wondered if we’d be able to make our racers move quickly and how we would control the direction they travelled in. We were happy to know that each student was going to work with the exact same materials.

Then we began to follow the instructions and made some changes if we felt they were needed. For example, some students adjusted the position of the ‘car’/ cardboard box placing it vertically and not horizontally to work with.

Making the eco racers proved more challenging than we originally thought it would be but we persevered as we know that engineers and scientists are faced with lots of challenges when they are designing and creating new objects.

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We learned a new word – ‘chassis’ – and some of our class explained that this refers to the base frame of the car. Fixing the front and back axle required lots of concentration, as did making sure the rubber bands were placed correctly. We knew they would ‘power’ our eco racers so were very careful to make sure we could wind them tightly enough to release enough energy to send our eco racers far!

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Testing our eco racers proved to be great fun and we predicted how far we could send them in centimetres and recorded our scores on record sheets. Our school hall became the race track for an afternoon…

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We soon noticed that elastic bands are all slightly different. Some are thick, some are thin and some have small faults in them. This meant that we got some variation in how far our eco racers could travel. We had to be careful that we didn’t stretch the rubber bands too much or else they snapped! We also soon realised that our eco racers could reverse as well as travelling forward so we needed to make sure we wound our rubber bands in the direction we wanted to travel.

We concluded that the more turns of the rubber bands we gave our eco racers, the further the car travels. This wasn’t true every time as sometimes the cars tried to move too quickly and ended up skidding and not travelling very far at all! This wheelspin is something that we need to investigate further. We want to try to move our eco racers with lots of different types of rubber bands.

We used metre sticks to measure the distances travelled and were impressed with our findings! We definitely think the cars travelled better in the school hall than they would have in our classroom which has a carpet floor. The greatest distance travelled was 125 centimetres!

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We think that eco racers could be made by companies in the future to reduce air pollution and to encourage everyone to make more sustainable decisions when it comes to travel.

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