St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

6th class have exciting news! They have created a brand new website to match their Primary Science Fair project! Check it out here!  

Junior Infants did a fun science project! We went fishing with magnets! This was for our part in the school’s Discover Primary Science and Maths award. Before we could go fishing however, we had lots to learn. First we learned the difference between wood and metal. A spoon is made from metal. This peg is made from wood but has some metal in the middle keeping it together. Cool! We learned that kettles, cars and scissors have metal in them. We saw that chairs, tables and rolling pins are made out of wood. We filled out this sheet to show teacher that we could tell which objects are made out... 

We’re very excited to share the highlights of this year’s Mini-Scientist showcase in St Peter’s! Last year was our first year to take part in the Intel Mini-Scientist programme and we really enjoyed it. You can find all of our blog posts related to the Mini-Scientist competition here. This year, we approached it slightly differently. In September, we formed a Mini Digital Youth Council (you can learn more about the senior version here) and we decided that as part of their work, they could take part in the Mini-Scientist programme and they were encouraged to include a focus on... 

We have been busy designing and making our own puppets in Senior Infants to help us understand the forces of pushing and pulling. We used paper cups, tissue paper, felt pieces, lollipop sticks and smiley faces to make our puppets. We use them by pushing and pulling. We experimented with our designs to make sure that they worked properly.  We had lots of fun making our puppets and want to say a big thanks to Liam who made sure that we all got to use some colourful hair to make our puppets look extra special! 🙂  

Last Saturday, St. Peter’s had the huge honour of showcasing their technology and ICT use in Dublin Castle at the Excited Digital Learning Conference. We were invited to participate having completed the Digital Schools of Distinction adjudication. It has been an incredible year for St. Peter’s, and we have worked to improve and enhance our use of ICT at every level in the school. This has led to great success at a national level, and we have been successful in the national Eircom Junior Spiders awards, the national Mathletes finals and we have also won a Creative Schools award for use... 

5th class have started their final Design and Make project of the year and today, we started our research and planning. The task is to design something that would be suitable for the seafront in Bray and that uses electricity. We’re going to plan our designs using SketchUp and then build them in class. We’ve done a lot of preparation work on Design and Make and electricity. Today, we went to Bray Seafront on a research mission. We were deciding where we would place our project on the seafront and we were also evaluating what would fit in well down there. We had looked at Bray Seafront... 

Daft Punk – Technologic from Anastasia Bandrina on Vimeo. Welcome back everyone! We can’t wait for Term 3 to start. We have so many exciting things on the cards – and this week will be hard to beat! We’re starting off Term 3 with Tech Week 2014.  It is a celebration of the opportunities that technology brings into our lives, as it inspires and encourages us in our learning and daily work. The aim of Tech Week is to highlight how important technology is to us, as we work creatively in school and at home! We can’t imagine life in St. Peter’s without the internet,... 

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.  

Today we were reviewing electricity. We started with Think-Pair-Share where we discussed what we already know about electricity – a good way of warming up our brains! Next we examined a concept cartoon that Ms Sexton got at her STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths) course. We discussed what we thought about the cartoons and we generated questions and theories about it: The switch turns the lamp on and off It doesn’t matter where the switch is on the circuit because as long as there’s a power source and a bulb, they’ll light. I don’t think that the small wire...