St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

Check out the gingerbread men 5th class decorated. Which is your favourite one?

Huge congrations to Heidi Clucas for winning the overall Bray Drugs Task Force’s art competition. As a result of this, Heidi’s art work above will be printed onto bookmarks for every child in the Bray area. Congratulations also to Naoise Sweeney McMaster and Kurina Mason for winning a prize in their age category. Well done girls!!

3rd Class have been up to lots over the last few weeks and have been kept very busy!

We celebrated Anti – Bullying month this and are now all feel very confident that we would recognise what bullying is, what we’d do if we saw it happening to others and how to deal with it if it ever happened to us.

In maths we learned to tell the time – we spend a while exploring clocks and the hands and talking about how many seconds are in 1 minute, how many minutes in an hour, hours in a day etc. We soon got the hang of how the ‘to’ side and ‘past’ side with lots of practice, including making a human clock!

We also celebrated Science week during November. This was a great week as we explored different STEM experiments that tied in with our theme of Space. We built our own rockets that had to meet criteria such as reaching a certain height and having to stand for a length of time, 3rd did an excellent job building those.

We also launched our own rockets. This was super exciting – we mixed vinegar and baking soda together in a bottle, this created a reaction that forced the bottle to shoot up in the air, just like a real rockets

Finally, we completed lots of Space based art including floating astronauts and created our own planets. We had a brilliant month, roll on the fun of December!!

Each student has been given a packet of gingerbread men today. Your task is to design and decorate one of these and send a photo of it to you teacher on Class Dojo or to the school ‘s Whatsapp. There are a few gingerbread men in the packet, so if you make a mistake you can try again. The more creative the better. There will be a small prize for each class winner.
Entries will need to be in by next Monday and will be posted on the blog. The best of luck everyone!!

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 looked at different bullying scenarios and how people might feel in different situations.

Luckily this isn’t a problem for us in Junior Infants who have been working really hard on getting along, sharing and being a team since the start of the year. We added some team work skills into our lessons like Cross the Arctic. Working together as a team we got really good at crossing the hall on two mats without touching the ground.

We power-hosed, sanded and oiled Jodie’s swing in her garden to make it look like new again.

This month in 4^th Class we are learning about the topic of ‘Transport’. In celebration of Science Week, we started off the week using a K’nex STEM challenge to create a hot air balloon model!

We continued the week with another STEM activity and asked the question – ‘How do parachutes work?’ Parachutes need to be able to catch air inside them so we spent some time thinking of what materials we could use for our parachutes. Then we spent time designing our parachutes.

Each group received the same amount of materials and time to complete the activity. We only had one variable – the material used.

After constructing our designs, we really enjoyed testing our parachutes.

5th Class had great fun investigating, exploring and creating for Science Week 2020.

At the beginning of the week we used the Lego WeDo kits to create satellites, robots and windmills. We first had to create our Lego model. We then used Bluetooth to connect our creations to tablets. From there we could program our Lego creations. We could make them move, spin, change colour and make noises.

We have been learning all about Space. One child in the class cashed in their Dojo Points to teach the class a lesson. He chose to teach us about rockets and how they launch. He recorded a video of himself playing a rocket simulator and presented it to the class. We were all fascinated and loved his lesson!

We researched our own information about space using the tablets. Each child in the class researched a different planet. We created a short presentation based on this.

Later in the week we decided to make our own paper rockets. We created these using pencils, paper and masking tape. We measured how far they could fly by launching them via a straw. We had great fun trying to make them go as far as possible. We are planning to change something about our rockets this week and see does this change how far the rocket can fly.

We have just finished another exciting Science Week in St. Peter’s. Junior Infants loved getting to grips with this week’s STEM lessons. 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 classroom and school. Finally we came back and tried to predict which items from a group were magnetic and which were not and tested these out.

Later in the week we ventured into early programming skills. In small groups we got to play with Beebots. We tried to programme our robots to move around the mat from one area to another or under tables and back using simple steps and counting steps up to 5. Next time we will be working on left and right!

We have our anti-bullying month in the school this 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.