St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

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... 

Fizzy Rainbow Easter ‘Egg-speriment’ (Credit: https://littlebinsforlittlehands.com/baking-soda-and-vinegar-rainbow-easter-eggs/) Question: What happens when you mix baking soda and vinegar? Predict: What do you think will happen? You will need: Small plastic Easter eggs or real empty egg shells that have been washed outEmpty egg cartonBaking soda Vinegar or lemon juiceFood colouring (optional)Tray Investigation: Place the tray on the table and put the egg carton on the tray. If you don’t have a tray, you could put some newspaper or paper towels on the table. Put your... 

Engineers Week 2020 This year for Engineering week, 4th Class took a trip to Bray Library to meet with a local Bray Engineer to learn about the important role of being an engineer.                                                                                                            We learned... 

Each year St Peters has a proud tradition in exploring all the rudiments of the wonderful world of STEM/Science and of entering the ESB Science Blast. This year was no different. As an innovative 6th class we have a great interest in sports and fitness and so chose to look at how we could improve our general health . Researching under the science stand of Living Things, this idea then evolved and became more specific as we looked into which type of training improves our 10 metre sprint times the most. We began the hard work in October and worked diligently over 16 training sessions... 

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... 

In first class, we became engineers, we made our very own catapults! Here’s how we did it: Firstly, we had to investigate how catapults worked. We watched different videos which showed us loads of different catapults, how they were made and how they worked!Each group then decided which catapult they wanted to make. Each group then decided on the materials they wanted to use. They could choose from straws, lollipop sticks, bottle caps, plastic spoons, pipe cleaners, elastic bands, sellotape and plastic. For their design, they needed to choose the materials that would keep their catapult... 

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’... 

Discover Primary Science 2nd Class Lesson Brief Summary of our STEM Experiment: Stimulus/Rationale: Recently, 2nd class wanted to investigate different methods of transport for Santa Claus. This was stimulated by a question I posed to the class, ‘If the reindeer went on strike on Christmas Eve how would Santa Claus travel to deliver presents to all the boys and girls?’ We brainstormed some alternatives coming up with rockets, flying cars, jet-pack’s, wings etc. however a quick and feasible alternative we agreed would be a parachute. Task: Design and build a parachute for... 

Our questions were –Which liquid will cause our candy cane to disappear the fastest? To conduct our experiment, we needed: 3 plastic cups, 3 candy canes, vinegar, warm water and cold water. We labelled our 3 clear cups and then filled the cups with warm water, cold water and vinegar. Then, we made predictions. We thought the vinegar would make the candy cane disappear because it was smelly! We voted to put the “hook” side of the candy cane down so that more of the candy was in the liquid. We put one candy cane in each cup and watched to see what would happen. Within... 

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...