St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

Discover Primary Science and Maths 2021 Application Welcome to our submission for the Discover Primary Science and Maths award for 2021. This is our 16th year taking part in the Awards, although this school year has been a little different! Once again, 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 7th year that we have had Junior and Senior Infants taking part in the award! It is great to see the young scientists... 

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... 

Keeping with our theme of Easter we decided to do an experiment using eggs! I laid out the materials we would be using during the experiment to aid discussing throughout (an egg, salt, a bowl of water and a spoon). First, we discussed and predicted whether an egg would float or sink when put into a bowl of water. We then put this to the test! We all predicted correctly with great ideas behind why this happened- the main one being that the egg was heavy! The children were then asked ‘how could we get this egg to float in the water?’. The children were encouraged to think... 

Welcome to our submission for the Discover Primary Science and Maths award for 2020. This is our 15th year taking part in the Awards, although this school year has been a little different! Once again, 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 6th 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. Each year... 

This week 3rd class took on the tricky STEM challenge of building their own bridge! They had to research bridges and then design one based on their research. They could use any materials they wanted but the bridge must have been strong enough to hold a food can. Once they had their ideas down on paper, they began the hard (but fun) part – building the bridge. And when this was completed they tested out its strength by using a food can on top. Some had to amend some areas and make slight changes but the results are fantastic, check out the pictures below, I was so impressed. Super... 

This week, we listened to the story ‘Commotion in the Ocean’ by Giles Andreae. This book was full of lots of short rhymes that told us about all of the creatures that live in the sea! 🐟 🐬 Senior Infants taught their teacher about sea creatures!🐠 🐠 Some children wrote about the shark, one wrote a story about a crab named Buttercup. Miss Conway even got to learn some new information about the big blue whale and the jiggly jellyfish. Miss Conway had a great time learning all of this new information from senior infants. Thanks for teaching... 

In St. Peter’s, we have a long history of participation in the RDS primary science events and we were delighted to continue this at Science Blast in early March. We had a fantastic day and we were delighted to share our project and our work in STEM with the Nationwide team recently. Thank you so much to Nationwide for showcasing such an important part of our school! We were at @theRDS during Science Blast in February to find about the history of the Royal Dublin Society & we met the pupils at @StPetersBray as they prepared for @esbscienceblast on #RTENationwide Friday 17th April... 

Recently, we were very excited to receive a visit from Sophie from Microsoft Ireland. Sophie taught us all about the importance of coding in today’s world. We really enjoy learning with technology in St Peter’s and we love to try out new tools and ways of learning. https://twitter.com/StPetersBray/status/1228324510249734145 https://twitter.com/StPetersBray/status/1228315485403525121 We really enjoyed our visit from Sophie – her Minecraft workshop was fascinating and made us think about it in a whole new light! Since Sophie’s visit, we’ve been working... 

5th class have really enjoyed using Lego WeDo this year to create lots of different constructions that we then program to move 😊 We really love Lego WeDo because it’s easy to use and allows us to use our coding skills. We love taking part in STEM challenges and recently built our own models. We worked in teams and had collaborate to build our chosen creation. We used our tablets to follow the instructions and to make sure that our Lego was built correctly – although it’s important to remember you can be as creative as possible and some of us added some ‘special additions’... 

In celebration of Science Week 2019 we decided to carry out another STEM activity! We love designing and making and wasted no time in deciding what STEM activity to try this time. We have been learning about World War 2 this month and last week we watched some footage of the D – Day parachute landings in Normandy in 1944. We wanted to learn some more about how the parachutes that the soldiers used worked and what they were made from. We looked at various video clips and found out that the parachutes were often made from silk and nylon. We were surprised as we thought silk was a soft material...