St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

Last week, 2nd class read a wonderful book called Iggy Peck Architect by Andrea Beaty. In this story there’s a little boy who is always building things. When he went on a school tour, the bridge to their picnic area collapsed and he and his class had to build a new bridge to get back across. This got us thinking about how we could make bridges. We looked at a few different types of bridges and their structures and talked about local bridges we know of. This was all under the strand of Energy and Forces. We then got into pairs and drew a plan of the bridges we wanted to make. We looked at... 

5th class conducted an experiment this week using the strand energy and forces and the strand unit heat. The objective of the experiment was to measure and record temperature using a thermometer. The children had to compare the heat insulation properties of different materials. These materials included, aluminium foil, fabric and tissue paper. Each group had to ‘insulate’ their cups using the materials provided. Each group was given a recording sheet and the children had to check the temperature of each cup throughout the day. When the children had finished their experiments, they wrote a short... 

STEM challenge number 1: Design and make a paper aeroplane which can float. 6th class passed this test with flying colours 🙂 !! They were tasked with designing and making a floating paper aeroplane. With a homework pass at stake for the winning design, we had some heavy negotiations about the best and fairest test to grade our designs.  We decided that our floatplanes would need to carry/hold 5 marbles when floating. We worked in pairs to design and make a paper floatplane.  It was important to use waterproof materials for this task, but also to ensure our designs could also function as planes. ... 

We were delighted to take part in the FIRST Lego League Competition in Galway again this year as part of our Lego Club. This was our third year to enter the competition and we had a brilliant time again. There are 3 main elements to the competition – The Project, Core Values and The Robot Game & design Problem For the project this year we were asked to look at ways we find, use, transport and dispose of water and how we could improve this. We started looking at all the ways we use water in our lives. At Lego Club we split into groups and listed all the ways we use water every day. Then we... 

Can we design a rollercoaster which reaches an elevation above it’s starting point (without using a motor)?  This is the question 6th class worked tirelessly to answer over the past number of weeks.  Today, a group from the class were in the RDS to present their work to the judges and a sold out audience of curious parents, teachers and children.  Here are some pictures of our project and the work we did so brilliantly today. We attracted the interest of RTE news 🙂 and we even made it on to the telly. Follow this link below and we will make our appearance at 0:51 on News Today!  Well... 

Welcome to our submission for the Discover Primary Science and Maths award for 2017. This is our 12th 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 3rd 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. Yet again, a huge amount of work has gone into this. Every... 

6th Class took part in the RDS Young Scientist Fair once again. Our theme this year was our climate, specifically looking at the question of “Does weather affect our ability to learn in school?”. After we had agreed on the theme and question for our Science presentation, we began by making our predictions. Some of the pupils thought they weather would affect us in school. For example, Leanne thought the sound of rain is very relaxing so that in turn, might help us concentrate better in class. Abbie also made the point that sometimes people get headaches when it is too hot and that it makes... 

First class have been learning about summer, the beach and boats in Bray harbour. Our focus was how boats float in the water. We discussed the importance of boats as the transport of goods/people, but in order to do so the boat must float. Firstly we brainstormed the properties of making a boat. We discussed materials that would be good or bad to float and why. We linked the Titanic which sank and concluded our boats would require good construction without any holes to avoid sinking. In order to predict we needed to understand floating and sinking so we investigated with an orange. Once placed... 

Senior Infants have been taking part in an after-school club based on STEM. Carl Dempsey from Salesforce has been helping out with the club and we’ve really enjoyed welcoming him to our classroom. All of the sessions were based on nursery rhymes or fairytales. We measured this tower and it was the tallest! Session 1 was based on Humpty Dumpty and materials. Humpty Dumpty likes to sit on high structures so we got into groups and built walls as high as we could. The walls had to stand by themselves by the end of the five minutes. We learned a lot about what makes structures sturdy –... 

2nd class have been learning all about our bodies in science. After chatting in our pairs about what we thought our hearts did, we then examined our wrists to find veins. Some of us thought they were blue, some purple and some green. When we held them over our heads for a minute they started to feel cold and numb. We thought maybe that’s because it was harder for the blood to get to it when it was up so high. Then we looked at finding our pulses. Some of us had seen in movies how doctors and medics check pulses, but we had never done it ourselves. We found that we couldn’t use our...