St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

Welcome to our submission for the Discover Primary Science and Maths award for 2019. This is our 14th 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 5th 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. This year, we have had an even bigger focus on STEM across... 

This week in Science, we decided to find out whether or not our brains are affected when we eat chocolate. Firstly, we watched a video about the brain and illusions and how sometimes we can trick our brain with illusions. We then tried to create our own illusions by tricking our brain into thinking we had a hole in our hand. This was done by rolling a lined sheet of paper and holding it up to our eye and looking through it, while moving our hand towards and away from our eye –  it did look like we had a hole in our hands!! 🙂 Next, we looked at a slide where there was different words... 

                                     Second Class and Materials    Second class have been really busy learning all about materials. We have been examining how different materials are used in our environment.   There is building work happening outside our classroom at the moment and it is a bit noisy. We decided we would experiment with different materials to make earmuffs for ourselves so that we can work in peace!   Choosing Materials  Everybody in the class decided they would bring different things from their house to test for our earmuffs. We collected:  Paper... 

Humpty Dumpty STEM Experiment   Here in Junior and Senior Infants, we had great fun reciting the Humpty Dumpty rhyme. This got us thinking about how we could help protect Humpty Dumpty from cracking in the future. We decorated our individual Humpty Dumpty’s by using whiteboard markers to draw faces on our hard boiled eggs.     We then placed each Humpty Dumpty into a ziplock bag filled with different materials to cushion Humpty’s fall to see which material would best protect him. Before beginning the experiment, we discussed the different materials we would use to try... 

First Class have been having great fun programming Bee-Bots over the past few days. Bee-Bots are floor robots that we can code to move around. We have been using them to practice our tables and number work in maths. These number lines have also been useful when practicing counting in Irish.         We have also been building mazes for Bee-Bot. We love challenging each other when building mazes. We think they are a-MAZE-ing 🙂         We have been practicing using a Bee-Bot mat. We use challenge cards which show us pictures of where we want Bee-Bot to start and where we want Bee-Bot... 

First Class have been learning all about hot air balloons in SESE. Firstly we all shared what we know about hot air balloons already and looked at pictures of different hot air balloons. We then watched videos of hot air balloons in action and were all amazed at how they moved through the sky. We began asking lots of questions about hot air balloons such as ‘Why are they called hot air balloons?’ and ‘How do hot air balloons float in the sky?’. From watching the videos we were very interested in the use of fire to heat the air in the envelope of the hot air balloon. We decided... 

Mr. Foley’s class went to visit Sealife as part of our Discover Primary Science project. Sealife is a SFI Discover Centre in Ireland. It was the first time some of the pupils had made the short trip to Sealife and everybody had great fun there while learning about what lives in the sea both in Ireland and abroad. While we there we learned all about the different types of fish in Irish sea water, as well as tropical fish that can be only found in Ireland in the centre in Bray. These tropical fish need warm water to survive and our seas are too cold for them. Luckily, some of the tanks in Sealife... 

5th class have been learning all about how energy can be transferred from one object or medium to another. We were particularly interested in radiation – energy that is transferred from the sun in waves. After taking part in a Department of the Environment course, we wanted to find out more about how effective the sun is as a renewable source of energy. As the world we live in continues to grow and change, we think it’s important to use natural resources as a source of energy. Caring for the environment is hugely important and very topical at the moment, given the worldwide school strikes for... 

We all know that chocolate is delicious when it’s melted to make chocolate brownies, Easter eggs or chocolate sauce 😋. Fourth class decided to try to find out at what temperature chocolate melts at. The question we asked ourselves was:  Do all types of chocolate melt at the same temperature?   Step 1: To investigate our question we chose to use white, milk and dark chocolate and placed them into tin foil trays. Step 2: We then made our predictions and estimates as to what temperature we thought each type of chocolate would melt at.   Step 3: We then carefully added warm... 

On March 6th, 6th class took part in the first ever ESB Science Blast in the RDS. We were really proud to attend and to present our project on the science of the playground. We had a brilliant day, attending two workshops, speaking to the judges and exploring the other stands. Over the last few months, we’ve taken part in a number of investigations related to the playground. These investigations taught us a lot about slides, zip lines and surfaces, but more importantly, we learned a lot about fair testing, the process of design and make and the skills of STEM. Thanks to the RDS and ESB for...