St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

Welcome to our submission for the Discover Primary Science and Maths award for 2014. As you know, Maths and Science are really important to us here in St Peter’s. There are a number of criteria that needs to be fulfilled when applying for the award. We’re using our blog to submit our award and to link back to our activities during the year. Our AoSME number is WW007. Step 1: Greenwave -read all about our work about weather and about recording the signs of Spring here. Step 2: Prescribed activities – Ms Mitchell’s class learned about 2nd class worked on the Materials strand... 

3rd Class looked at the Energy and Forces strand of the Science curriculum for Discovery Primary Science, focusing on the topic of gravity. We also integrated this into other subjects such as Maths and History. Our title was: ‘Investigating How Helicopters Fly’. Our objectives were: To investigate gravity as a force To explore how some things fall To investigate if the size and shape of the rotor blades affect the way a helicopter spins To investigate if the weight of the paper helicopter affects the way a helicopter spins Kian drew this picture to show how we made our paper helicopters: Here... 

Hello, we are Ms. Brennan’s 2nd Class. This is our first time to do the Discover Primary Science and Maths Project. We are really excited. We completed part two of the project where we designed and made experiments from the Materials strand. We did the  ‘Which Ball Is The Bounciest’ test.  We hope you enjoy reading our project! Which ball is the bounciest? What you need A variety of balls Metre stick Hard surface on which the balls can bounce Grass surface on which the balls can bounce Here we are, showing you the balls we used! Skills we used for this experiment 1. Predicting 2.... 

On Tuesday in 4th class we talked about the two best footballers in the world, Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. We discussed what they were best known for. Abhishek said that Messi is known as “The King of Dribbling”. We talked about why he is so good at dribbling. Abhishek said that it was because of his balance. When we talked about why his balance was so good, Mason noted that he was tiny and that this helped him. We decided to investigate what it is that helps us keep our balance, as part of this year’s Discover Primary Science and Maths award. Mr. Foley explained... 

We’ve been working hard to record our signs of Spring using Greenwave. We really missed Mr Curran who retired last year as he’s always brilliant for noticing the signs of Spring! Here’s our dashboard: Some of the classes have been following the weather forecast during News2day on the RTE player and discussing what the meteorological terms mean.  

Ms. Mitchell’s class studied the topic of Sound for the Discover Science Project;                                                                               read on to find out what we discovered! Exploring what we know and thinking aloud First we had a quick” think, pair, share” about what we think of when we hear the word “Sound”. Next we shared our thoughts and wrote them on the board in a thought shower, some were very interesting! Afterwards we decided to start thinking about what sound actually is? We had some super thoughts! Nathan k... 

You may have noticed the new noticeboard outside 5th class focusing on their recent adventures in Design and Make.   It’s all part of Ms Sexton’s course in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) and as you can see from the Prezi – the students of 5th class had all of the good ideas in this lesson! Click on the title of the post to check out our Vines and see what happened when we tested them – watch Adam’s closely!  

A couple of weeks ago, we were thrilled and excited to get news that we’d won a prize from STEPS for our work during Engineer’s Week. Sam, AaronG, LukeOB and Davy from 5th class had seen Scientific Sue in action at the Intel Regional Finals of the Mini-Scientist and they raised the excitement levels by telling everyone how cool her show was! You can check out her website here – we highly recommend her show! One of the coolest things about the prize was that we were allowed to invite other schools to join in the fun. The first session of the day was at 9.45.  

We’ve had a ball with Engineer’s Week this week! Here’s a round up post of all the activities that took place in different classes over the week… 2nd Class made Apple Mummies! You’ll find out how they did it here. Our apple mummies! They also did the ‘raw egg’ test. It is definitely something that you could all try at home! Find out how to do it here! Our raw egg test What the egg looked like after the vinegar dissolved the shell! We put it over the light to be able to see through it! When we looked at electrical engineering we made string telephones. We... 

Our project asked the question ‘which slime is the strongest?’ We made two types of slime – one was with borax, PVA glue and water. The second was made from cornflour and water. The cornflour slime didn’t work because it just stayed as a liquid but the borax stretched well. We found the instructions online but if we were making the cornflour slime again, we’d use less water and more cornflour. We made slime in 2nd class and it was really strong. We think if we made more of the borax slime, it would work better. We also could have added food colouring to make it look...