St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

This year, 5th class took on the Elf Factor as their class play for the Christmas concert. You can see photos from the Christmas play here and listen to 2nd class and their ‘Little Rascals’ play here. We hope you enjoy our video – we really enjoyed making it!

The Elf Factor from St Peter’s, Bray on Vimeo.

Today, 5th class are leaving comments for http://kidblog.org/MrsBoycesClass-4/ Their work is very good. You should check it out too and leave them some comments.

One of the very first ‘Wednesday for Parents’ posts was also one of our most popular – it listed a number of websites and online activities to help your child with place value. You can find that post here. When we planned a follow up post, fractions jumped out as an important one to cover. The activities below have been laid out so that you can choose a particular area of fractions to work on or revise, or you can choose from the games further down in the post to work on a more general area. As always, although we’ve checked out the websites, we can’t guarantee that they’re free of pop-ups, ads etc, that could lead your child to a different site. We recommend that you supervise your child’s use of these sites carefully.

What does your child feel they need to work on?

I need to work on fractions that have the same value. (more activities here and here)

I need to work on matching mixed fractions.

I need to work on matching equivalent fractions. (more activities here and here)

I need to work on putting fractions in order.

I need to work on adding fractions. (more activities here and here)

I need to work on changing improper fractions into mixed numbers.

I need to work on subtracting fractions. (more activities here)

I need to work on simplifying fractions. (more activities here )]

I need to work on identifying prime numbers.

I need to work on finding a fraction of a number.

I need to work on finding the lowest common denominator.

I need to work on finding the highest common factor.

I need to work on rounding mixed numbers to the nearest whole number.

I need to work on estimating fractions.

I need to work on number line fractions. (Tutorial here – more activities here)

Other fraction games:

Fraction Booster – this game introduces your child to different fraction activities as they level up.

Fraction flags – This is a great little game that asks your child to fill in squares on a flag according to the instructed fractions.

This link is more a series of tutorials rather than actual games – extremely useful to help with homework etc.

Melvin’s Make-A-Match – This game is all about matching equivalent fractions.

Fractotron – this game asks your child to compare fractions and ask if they’re less, equal to or more than a half. Good for estimation work.

Falling leaves – can be played as a two-player – works on finding a fraction of a number

If you’d like any more online games on fractions, let us know! Even better, let us know what your favourite games are in the comments. These activities are intended as a support for homework or your child’s home learning, but you are also always welcome to call into your child’s teacher to discuss any concerns you have about your child’s progress.

What topic would you like to see covered in our Maths online series next?

Aaron here, Robert’s out today but he made a podcast yesterday asking us how our ‘Write a Book’ project is going.

Yesterday, I ran out of ideas so I started going back over my work. I found parts to add more detail into. When I was reading over my work, I was asking myself questions as if I was the reader. For example, I had written that I was nervous and when I read back over it, I added 4 sentences saying why I was nervous. I like editing because it makes your book much better and you’ll get more readers. Here’s a picture of my editing work:

Thanks for reading – that’s all for now,

Aaron

Our project asked the question ‘which slime is the strongest?’ We made two types of slime – one was with borax, PVA glue and water. The second was made from cornflour and water. The cornflour slime didn’t work because it just stayed as a liquid but the borax stretched well.

We found the instructions online but if we were making the cornflour slime again, we’d use less water and more cornflour. We made slime in 2nd class and it was really strong. We think if we made more of the borax slime, it would work better. We also could have added food colouring to make it look more like slime.

Our favourite part of the project was squeezing and pulling the slime. We enjoyed talking to the judges and it was a really good day. We weren’t too nervous because we knew our project really well.

Thanks for reading about it,

Jamie, Robert, Sky and Sam

The question was ‘can we make a lightbulb light up without using any wires?’ We were able to make it work using tinfoil as a conductor.

When we were researching our project, we found out that it’s not just wires that can conduct electricity. We found that tinfoil was the handiest one to use instead of a wire because you can twist it and it’s flexible. We didn’t think it would really work, so we were surprised when it did.

Our favourite part of the project was when it actually worked. We liked talking to the judges and we enjoyed making our display. You can try it out at home easily with a lightbulb, battery and tinfoil.

Thanks for reading about our project,

Kyle, Johnny and Dylan

Today we tried to use Storybird to help us with our Write-A-Book project. We challenged ourselves to use pictures to make up a story. We use Storybird to write stories. It is cool because the pictures are there for you. We try to put them together to make sense!

We wrote this story in just 5 minutes! Have a look!

2nd Class have had great fun in Music class recently. We have learned new songs, used actions to help us to tell the ‘music story’ of songs, listened to different pieces of music without words to ‘get-us-thinking’ and also we have picked up new ‘music words’. We decided to record two of our favourite songs from the past few weeks. We hope you like them.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/129303885″ params=”color=ff6600&auto_play=false&show_artwork=true” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/129304139″ params=”color=ff6600&auto_play=false&show_artwork=true” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

Our project was called ‘Does one hand react quicker than the other?’ We tested our question using two tests – one was by putting your hand into a bowl of ice and seeing how long you could leave it there in seconds. The other test was the ruler test, where you let the ruler go and see how quickly you can catch it again.

We found that with the ice, your dominant hand can last much longer in the ice than your non-dominant hand. There wasn’t as much of a difference in the ruler test, which surprised us because we thought it would have a much greater difference.

When we were researching our project, we learned that it’s believed that people who are left-handed are more creative but there’s a lot more right-handed people than left.

Our favourite part of the project was the ruler experiment because Keane enjoyed it more than doing the ice experiment. We were nervous talking to the judge but it was ok once we got started.

Thanks for reading about our project,

Billy, Keane and Kevin

Brotherly love!

On Friday everybody in St. Peter’s had a chance to win a golden ticket to the B.T. Young Scientist and Primary Science Fair. Me [Eduard] and my brother Lester won the golden ticket from twitter to go. We got to bring our whole family! It was a great day. We decided to write your a blog post to tell you all about it.

We went to the entrance and into the Minerva suite to get our wristbands. It was so great! We got a book about the history of the building and project. We went to the Discover Primary Science school section first and we saw lots of good things. The first thing we saw was a robot fixing a messed up Rubik’s Cube in only 10 minutes! Next we saw animal skulls. The smallest was a Snow Leopard and the biggest was the Zebra. After that I wandered off and I found a camera that lets me zoom into lots of things. I saw tube worms and barnacles on an Oyster. There were anenames, seaweed and crabs. I was able to zoom into my skin and clothes! My baby brother’s leather jacket looked like my skin but it was black and blue.

Following that we saw a robot that was able to be controlled by an Xbox 1 controller. My baby brother came second in a maze get out with a time of 8 minutes and 37 seconds. The robots were able to push buttons by pressing the A button on the controller to open hidden gates. We learned that 3 insects indicate fresh water and that leaches, rat tailed maggots and red worms indicates dirty water. Also the cowboys searched for gold by getting lots of sand into a pan and they started spinning the pan so the sand will go and the minerals will stay behind. After that we saw the Secondary School projects. They were incredible and must have taken hours to prepare for. We would love to take part some time.

After all that we were so tired and we decided to go home. We all had a great day! Thanks to everyone at BTYSE for such a great day out!