St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

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... 

Earlier this month we decided it could be interesting to learn more about the force and nature of hurricanes as the news was covering a lot on Hurricane/Storm Lorenzo. We decided undertaking a STEM challenge might be a fun way to do this! Firstly, we needed to carry out some research! We looked online for some footage of hurricanes and also read some helpful articles that advised people what to do in the event of a hurricane landing near them. We learned that hurricane winds can travel up to 200 miles per hour and that hurricanes form in the sea. They also tend to have heavy rain. The centre of...