St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

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... 

This year, 5th and 6th classes have been taking part in the Junior Entrepreneur programme. Over the course of the last few months, both classes have set up mini-companies, invested in their companies, sold their products and shared out the profits at the end of the process. Check out our videos of the process below: http://www.stpetersbrayblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/JEP_2019-1.mp4 http://www.stpetersbrayblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Tell_What_Happened.mp4 On Monday, 5th and 6th classes travelled to the RDS to the showcase. We had an amazing day out and really enjoyed seeing other... 

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...