St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

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.

We had a great week celebrating Science Week in Ms. Kane’s class, one of our favourite celebrations of the year! We love taking part in STEM activities on a regular basis and were excited to try lots of new ideas this week. We listened to Professor Luke O’ Neill talking about coronavirus, watched David Attenborough’s new documentary ‘A Life on Our Planet’ and used Lego WeDo! to design our visions for the future.

We learned lots about coronavirus by listening to Professor Luke O’ Neill answering questions on RTÉ Junior. Professor O’ Neill is a scientist and explained very clearly how coronavirus is spread and reminded us to keep washing our hands. We also enjoyed learning about where the term ‘coronavirus’ comes from and whether or not we can spread it to our pets (we were glad to hear that we can’t).

We also considered the science behind our baking this week. We made meringues and needed only egg whites and sugar to make them. It was a challenge separating the egg whites but thanks to Ms. Kelly we managed! We wondered how the egg whites looked like clouds or shaving foam when we whisked them? We learned that this is because the whisk creates a force through the egg whites which unfolds protein molecules. We know protein is also found in foods like chicken, fish and milk. The whisking also makes air bubbles that become trapped which make foam. Ms. Kelly even showed us the test to see if the eggs whites were whisked enough and turned the bowl upside down – they didn’t budge! There’s so much science involved in baking, we love learning about it!

We watched David Attenborough’s new documentary ‘A Life on Our Planet’ and loved it! It’s a really good example of the explanation genre, which we’re learning lots about, and it fits in perfectly with the theme of Science Week this year, ‘Choosing Our Future’. David Attenborough explained how the Earth is affected by how we, as humans live and gave us tips about how to improve the natural world. We had some great suggestions from pupils in our class that we’re sure David Attenborough would approve of, including using renewable energy sources like wind and solar power and trying to make small changes in our own lives, like continuing to recycle more and using less water at home, when brushing our teeth for example.

Inspired by the documentary, we decided to create some of our own visions for the future, using Lego WeDo. This gave us a chance to use our imaginations and to consider what we think will be important in our futures. Lego WeDo is so much fun to use and everyone worked so well in teams. Using the Lego WeDo app on our tablets we selected designs and got to work building and programming them using simple codes. One of our pods made a wind turbine that they hope will become a more common source of energy in years to come. Another pod created a helicopter as they were concerned that if the planet continues to heat up, more natural disasters will occur and we’ll need helicopters to send to save people and deliver resources. The final pod made a machine that could be used by farmers to speed up harvesting their crops. Really innovative ideas, a huge well done to all!

We kicked off Science week in 2nd class by diving into the theme of ‘Space and Planets’! We learned all about the different planets, the ISS and rockets.

STEAM: We decided to get creative and make our very own planets! We researched planets, painted them, gave them names and constructed the posters!

We wrote and presented to the class what it would be like to live on these planets!

STEM Challenge: Launching an Asteroid

Our first challenge was to create a catapult which would allow us to launch our “asteroids”. We had a competition to see whose asteroid travelled the furthest!

STEM Challenge 2: Alien Parachutes

Our second challenge was making safe parachutes for our “aliens” to land. We had to be sure it was a safe landing and that they remained in the air for at least 2 seconds! It was tricky but we really enjoyed it.

We were learning all about pets in 1st class so we decided to make homes for some of the pets we had discussed in class.

Each group made a pet rock and we made a whole class brainstorm on what our pet rocks would need in their homes to survive. Take a look at our brainstorm:

After we discussed our pets needs, we started to plan for our homes, making sure we included the essentials! Have a look at some of our plans.

We finally got started on our designing and creating part of science week. Take a look at how our finishing products turned out… would you be happy for your pet to live here?

We have been very busy this month in Senior Infants!

We learned all about the hospital this month. We became patients, doctors, surgeons, nurses, paramedics and receptionists. We built hospitals using our blocks and practised making some tools that surgeons, doctors and nurses use.

We read ‘The Witch with an Itch’ by Helen Baugh and made our own magic potions. Here are some photos of us making our playdough potions!

Here are our spooky Halloween Costumes!

Thank you so much Mr.Kinsella and Liz for helping us to make this yummy chocolate apples!

We have had a very busy month in Ms. Kane’s class. We’ve enjoyed celebrating Maths Week, taking part in STEM activities, baking and celebrating Hallowe’en!

Maths Week was a super opportunity for us to play some of our favourite problem solving games like draughts, Jenga and Frustration! We also took part in Place Value races in the hall and loved watching Maths TV.

We loved taking part in a simple STEM challenge to see which team could build the longest paper chain. It sounds easy but we’d recommend lots of teamwork to make it work! We only used 1 sheet of a paper, a pair of scissors and a stapler to complete the challenge. We had a time limit of 12 minutes and we all successfully made a paper chain, with the longest chain measuring 180cm!

Our favourite weekly activity is baking and we got to create some of our favourite recipes this month! We made s’mores (back by popular demand!) and chocolate apples to celebrate Hallowe’en! We were happy our friends in 6th class could enjoy some s’mores with us!

Finally, we had a fantastic time celebrating Hallowe’en together! Everybody made such a fantastic effort with their costumes! We’re looking forward to seeing what next month brings!

We started off the month with some Autumn Art. We used autumnal paints for our colourful dot painting. They turned out so well and really brightened up the classroom!

We had great fun designing and carving a pumpkin this month for Halloween and learning about the stages in which a pumpkin grows.

We had a brilliant last day before the mid-term, dressing up and painting pumpkins!

3rd class have had another super month this October in school, read on to see the different activities they’ve been up to!

Rang a trí kicked off October by learning how to multiply, they’re pros at it now and even built an array city showing the different arrays to make numbers. For maths week, we then looked at division and recognised the link between multiplication and addition and division and subtraction. To help us divide, we used skittles in groups and of course ate them after

We also learnt all about plants this month. We learned how plants need air, water, heat, soil and light to grow. Then we planted our own lettuce seeds in science. We wanted to test out if plants could grow without one of the above elements so we we also planted control pots – one without water, one without soil and one without light, to see if any seeds would grow – they didn’t.

We have also been very busy this month completing lots of fantastic Halloween art.

Firstly, we created egg carton animals. 3rd class used egg cartons for the faces and created a picture by painting their bodies on the cardboard, they turned out so well!

We created some spooky Halloween art including skeletons and pumpkins!

Our final bit of art was creating Halloween costumes for Ms. Roche – including a Dracula, a bat, a clown and many ore, they were brilliant!

Finally, we had a brilliant last day before the holidays dressing up and playing games and painting pumpkins!

We wrapped up the month by finding out we won the most points for speaking Gaeilge so we got to Spin the wheel and won extra Golden time – a fantastic way to end the month!

6th class have been working really hard on their submission to the ReelLIFE Science Video competition. We made a short video all about nettles (and about a few other themes such as women in STEM and the power of science to ease our fears!)

We had great fun researching, creating and filming our film – the hardest part was keeping it as short as possible! We hope you enjoy it!