St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

Welcome to our submission for the Discover Primary Science and Maths award for 2017. This is our 12th year taking part in the Awards! Once again this year 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 3rd 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. Yet again, a huge amount of work has gone into this. Every... 

6th Class took part in the RDS Young Scientist Fair once again. Our theme this year was our climate, specifically looking at the question of “Does weather affect our ability to learn in school?”. After we had agreed on the theme and question for our Science presentation, we began by making our predictions. Some of the pupils thought they weather would affect us in school. For example, Leanne thought the sound of rain is very relaxing so that in turn, might help us concentrate better in class. Abbie also made the point that sometimes people get headaches when it is too hot and that it makes... 

First class have been learning about summer, the beach and boats in Bray harbour. Our focus was how boats float in the water. We discussed the importance of boats as the transport of goods/people, but in order to do so the boat must float. Firstly we brainstormed the properties of making a boat. We discussed materials that would be good or bad to float and why. We linked the Titanic which sank and concluded our boats would require good construction without any holes to avoid sinking. In order to predict we needed to understand floating and sinking so we investigated with an orange. Once placed... 

Senior Infants have been taking part in an after-school club based on STEM. Carl Dempsey from Salesforce has been helping out with the club and we’ve really enjoyed welcoming him to our classroom. All of the sessions were based on nursery rhymes or fairytales. We measured this tower and it was the tallest! Session 1 was based on Humpty Dumpty and materials. Humpty Dumpty likes to sit on high structures so we got into groups and built walls as high as we could. The walls had to stand by themselves by the end of the five minutes. We learned a lot about what makes structures sturdy –... 

This week, in Junior Infants, we met a whale named Sally, who lives in the sea beside a lovely village called Sandy Shores. We asked Sally lots of questions about Sandy Shores and made predictions about what she might like to play, eat and do for fun! She was very upset the second time she came to visit us, however, because Sandy Shores had developed a terrible litter problem. Her home was getting polluted with lots of rubbish and this made her feel very sad. Luckily, Junior Infants are experts at dealing with rubbish and looking after the environment. The Lord Mayor of Sandy Shores heard that... 

2nd class have been learning all about our bodies in science. After chatting in our pairs about what we thought our hearts did, we then examined our wrists to find veins. Some of us thought they were blue, some purple and some green. When we held them over our heads for a minute they started to feel cold and numb. We thought maybe that’s because it was harder for the blood to get to it when it was up so high. Then we looked at finding our pulses. Some of us had seen in movies how doctors and medics check pulses, but we had never done it ourselves. We found that we couldn’t use our... 

3rd class took a look at solar energy as a renewable energy source.  What a week we picked! We designed plans for solar powered cars. We discussed ways of measuring solar power and we conducted a water heating experiment.  We made use of two butter cartons, some cling film, thermometers, a graduated cylinder and some water. Preparation For a fair test we ensured the holes at the top of the contaoners were equal. This made sure that equal sunlight was getting into each container. We placed cling film around the holes to prevent wind chill from affecting out measures. We measured our water carefully... 

4th Class have been exploring, experimenting and questioning themselves all about sound.  We began by brainstorming the word ‘sound’. Ideas were flowing from pitch, to how it travels, to music and instruments all the way to vibrations. The ukulele was also mentioned as we are learning the instrument, at the moment. Hence, came the idea to make music, so we put our minds to it and made our version of a guitar. Plastic containers, elastic bands, glass and water. We tested the plastic containers with the elastic bands…..straightaway the kids were making music. The sound being created by the... 

We measured using metre strips for accuracy around the windy track. In total the length of the rollercoaster was 3 metres and 28 cm.  It took the ball between 30 and 40 seconds to reach the bottom once released. We had great fun with this!  

3rd class recycled rolercoaster Made using only recycled materials. This rollercoaster has been a working progress over the past month. The children faced many challenges in this construction.  Measuring lengths and widths of tracks and also experimenting with different heights to ensure the ball would have enough momentum to make its way down to the bottom. We found that using skewers for support was important.  We also had lots of problem solving in areas where the ball was stopping or falling off the track. Estimation of the track length