St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

We love to integrate technology into the classroom whenever we can. Children are so adept at using IT now they are practically teaching us. We We love to use the school tablets to enhance our learning, particularly during Maths stations.

We use the IWB daily in the class and children love to get a chance to play games in literacy and numeracy activities. We also love to use it to help us relax with some mindfulness mediation and yoga.

We teach basic programming throughout the school and love to get a chance to use the Beebots to teach early programming skills.

Each month we look at how good our attendance is in the school and we are always trying to help improve it. February was our best month of the year so far, with 92.1% of the school being in for the month.

After meeting with our Student Council, we brought back “Spin the Wheel”. The Student Council went through what each prize was before assembly and decided to keep them the same as before. We agreed that each class gets to spin the wheel if their attendance improves from the previous month.

Mr. Vance had an assembly with the school on Tuesday. There was a lot of excitement amongst the boys and girls (and the staff!) for “Spin the Wheel”. You can watch the video of some of the classes spinning it at the bottom of this post. Well done to all the boys and girls. We also did a draw for children with perfect attendance for the year so far, with two big hampers given out to the winners. We were also very happy to be able to say that 118 children had either got perfect attendance in February, or improved on their attendance for January. These children have been put in a draw for book tokens from Dubray Books.

We hope to keep the good attendance up this month in March. There are 20 school days in March, and we look forward to hearing our attendance update at the end of the month!

Yesterday second class loved getting their hands dirty while they took on the task of investigating the makeup of soil. During this experiment, the boys and girls looked for which man-made and natural components of soil they could find.

We noted our findings on our worksheets and compared results from each group. There was great excitement as we found a worm in the soil as well!

We then used the soil to plant our own seeds as we have been learning about the plant life cycle. Stay tuned for the update on how our growing our own plants goes under different conditions!

We had a lovely day celebrating World Book Day in school. We all wore our pyjamas in as a special treat, it was very cosy!

As part of the celebration, we visited the school library to read some new books, Mr. Vance even stopped by and read us a funny story.

Have a look at some pictures below of us having some hot chocolate and completing some fun book wordsearches.

4th Class came down to our class and partnered with us for some shared reading of story books from our class library.

We made special bookmarks that we can use when reading ourselves at home!

Senior infants were tired by the end of the day, lucky they were in their pyjamas ready for a little snooze on the mat!

Junior Infants were really excited to do the Skittles Rainbow Experiment this week. (We’re not sure if it was because they love science or couldn’t wait to eat the left over skittles!)

This experiment shows that water molecules are more active in warm water than in cold water and as they come in contact with the sugar in the skittles they cause it to dissolve faster.

For the experiment we needed

• 1 pkt Skittles

• ¼ cup cold water

• 1/4 cup warm water

• 2 white plates Activity

To start we made predictions on what might happen and then we arranged the Skittles in a single row around the edge of the plate of each plate. We poured over enough cold water to cover all the Skittles and the plate itself on the first plate. Then we poured over enough warm water to cover all the Skittles and the plate itself on the second plate.

We watched and waited as a rainbow appears on the second plate, the colors will moved towards the middle and create a whirl of color. This didnt happen in the first plate! We discussed why this was the case.

Each group then got to try there own experiment to check out the results.

Of course we got to eat the left overs at the end!

Senior Infants spent all of last month learning about Space. We had a lot of fun doing different experiments and incorporating Space into our Aistear.

The different Aistear stations included our roleplay area which was the International Space Station, building a rocket in construction and playdough and making space passports in our writing station.

For Science, we experimented trying to launch a rocket into the air using bicarbonate soda and vinegar in a empty bottle with a cork lid. It was very exciting watching it launch into the air.

Our other Science lesson was trying to launch a paper rocket by blowing it with a straw. We tried different ways to see which was the most effective method to get our rocket to launch the furthest, this led to a race against each other in the hall!

Finally, Senior Infants spent a week making projects based on Space that were amazing! They ranged from planets, to rockets, to aliens and to solar systems. They were all very impressive and a lot of work was put in to making them!

We have been very busy in 5th class this month! We have been doing lots of STEM activities and improving our engineering skills! We worked on engineering a roller coaster made from paper. We have to work on our designs to allow a marble to move along our coaster!

We have also been learning about space this month! We completed a STEM activity creating rockets! We created some lovely space themed art too!

Before Christmas, 5th class were working to create a gingerbread house! We had to think about lots of different things before we built our houses. How big were the biscuits? How would we stick the together? What would be the best way to design our house?

After planning, we began to work on engineering our designs to create a stable home for the gingerbread man that would stand on it’s own.

4th class are learning all about Greece and we discovered that Greece was where the first Olympic Games was held. As a Stem challenge we decided to make our favourite Olympic Games and sports into table top challenges.

Each group picked a sport and began designing and creating ways they could make that into a table top game. We were delighted with our results and loved giving 3rd class a chance to play!
Take a look at our homemade Olympic Games: