St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

We had great fun taking part in our recent STEM challenge. We have been learning about climate change, sustainability and also celebrated Engineers Week 2021. To bring all of our recent learning together we decided to make our own eco racers, test how they operate and race them to see what makes them travel fast and in a straight line. We think eco racers might be the future of car design because their friendly to the environment, not using fuel to operate and can be cheap to make!

Before we got building, we planned our design based on the materials we knew we would be working with. It’s important to take time to consider the design of your project and ask questions about what we wanted to find out. Planning also gives us a chance to make adjustments to our designs and ask each other for help and suggestions should we need it.

After we planned the design of our eco racers we took a look at the materials we had to work with. They were simple and we wondered if we’d be able to make our racers move quickly and how we would control the direction they travelled in. We were happy to know that each student was going to work with the exact same materials.

Then we began to follow the instructions and made some changes if we felt they were needed. For example, some students adjusted the position of the ‘car’/ cardboard box placing it vertically and not horizontally to work with.

Making the eco racers proved more challenging than we originally thought it would be but we persevered as we know that engineers and scientists are faced with lots of challenges when they are designing and creating new objects.

We learned a new word – ‘chassis’ – and some of our class explained that this refers to the base frame of the car. Fixing the front and back axle required lots of concentration, as did making sure the rubber bands were placed correctly. We knew they would ‘power’ our eco racers so were very careful to make sure we could wind them tightly enough to release enough energy to send our eco racers far!

Testing our eco racers proved to be great fun and we predicted how far we could send them in centimetres and recorded our scores on record sheets. Our school hall became the race track for an afternoon…

We soon noticed that elastic bands are all slightly different. Some are thick, some are thin and some have small faults in them. This meant that we got some variation in how far our eco racers could travel. We had to be careful that we didn’t stretch the rubber bands too much or else they snapped! We also soon realised that our eco racers could reverse as well as travelling forward so we needed to make sure we wound our rubber bands in the direction we wanted to travel.

We concluded that the more turns of the rubber bands we gave our eco racers, the further the car travels. This wasn’t true every time as sometimes the cars tried to move too quickly and ended up skidding and not travelling very far at all! This wheelspin is something that we need to investigate further. We want to try to move our eco racers with lots of different types of rubber bands.

We used metre sticks to measure the distances travelled and were impressed with our findings! We definitely think the cars travelled better in the school hall than they would have in our classroom which has a carpet floor. The greatest distance travelled was 125 centimetres!

We think that eco racers could be made by companies in the future to reduce air pollution and to encourage everyone to make more sustainable decisions when it comes to travel.

Keeping with our theme of Easter we decided to do an experiment using eggs! I laid out the materials we would be using during the experiment to aid discussing throughout (an egg, salt, a bowl of water and a spoon).

First, we discussed and predicted whether an egg would float or sink when put into a bowl of water. We then put this to the test! We all predicted correctly with great ideas behind why this happened- the main one being that the egg was heavy!

The children were then asked ‘how could we get this egg to float in the water?’. The children were encouraged to think of ideas using materials at the top of the room. They decided to add salt to the water. There were many ideas behind this including the following:

• ‘The salt grains will push the egg to the top of the bowl’
• ‘Boats can float on the ocean and that has salt in it’
• ‘The salt will make the water heavier than the egg’.

We began testing the ideas by adding one spoonful of salt to the water at a time and mixing it in.

It took each group approximately 11/12 teaspoons of salt to get their egg to float! We learnt that adding salt to the water makes it more ‘dense’ than the egg which makes it float.

Check out our floating eggs at the end!

Welcome back to another update to our whole school story!

Well done to all taking part each week, it’s fantastic to see your creativity being recorded as a team effort and your writing and illustrations are brilliant!

Here is a special message from Bex this week:

Hi Everybody,

Blimey! This gets harder every week with so many amazing ideas and pictures!! As always I have tried to include as many ideas and artworks as possible but I am afraid this week not everyone has been able to be included as there were just so many. Thank you so much. So as you will read our story continues… I think we might be reaching near the end so please give me your ideas for the last part of the story and I will put them together over the holidays so we can see it read it all the way through at the beginning of next term.I hope you have a wonderful holiday and a very Happy Easter and get lots of chocolate! I am looking forward to seeing you all next term!

All the best, Bex

Have a look at the updated story below…

Lots to read about this week and our question is:

‘What will our rabbit wish for’?

We can’t wait to see your ideas and read the final draft of the story after our Easter break. Remember to submit your ideas by the end of this week!

Our whole school ‘write and draw a story’ task is a great way for us to get creative and there have been lots of fantastic submissions, both written and illustrations, from lots of pupils who are eager to continue the story.

A huge well done to all those who are taking part and remember, it’s never too late to get involved!

Bex has sent us on another message and included the developments of the story for this week:

Hurray! HAPPY BACK AT SCHOOL EVERYONE!!

️I am delighted for you all to be back at school again and wish you a wonderful first week back all together – it is lucky that there’s a break on Wednesday to give everyone a chance to settle back in after such a long time away – even having to get up so early!

AGAIN what absolutely fabulous artworks and imaginative ideas. I cannot tell you how much I am loving receiving your ideas at end of each week. It is literally a present in my email box. Thank you.
I have added to the story and now have a new question for you to ponder…

All the best, Bex.

Check out the updated story:

This week we are responding to the question ‘What happens next’?

Remember you are the authors and we can’t wait to hear your ideas!

Our write and draw a story creativity task has had a great response from students so far and we loved seeing all the different ideas you came up with last week in response to the question ‘Why was the rabbit there?’

Bex has sent on a message to everyone and has added some of your own ideas to the story! A huge well done to all and keep up the super work as your idea and illustration may be included in the next piece.

Good Morning Everyone!

WOW! What amazing ideas and beautiful pictures!! It was so wonderful to receive all your creative works. THANK YOU.

It is very important that you know, it was practically impossible to choose one way for the story to go as ALL of them would have made incredible stories.

Also I really struggled to choose the artwork to be included as I would have loved to include them all. 

I have tried to weave in a few of the wonderful ideas to our story so far and we now have our Alien Rabbit who has landed in St Peters playground…

I can’t wait to hear all your imaginative ideas for the next questions.

In the meantime, those still at home I hope you feel positive knowing that this is the last week, and those back at school, I hope you are enjoying being back with your friends and teachers again.

All the best and stay safe

Bex 

The story is getting very interesting. Have a look here at what the update includes:

There’s 3 questions for everyone to respond to with writing and illustrations this week and we’re excited to see what happens next!

The questions are:

1. What do rabbits from Mars eat?
2. If rabbits on Mars don’t hop, how do they get about?
3. How does our alien rabbit feel about being on Earth

Remember to be as creative as possible and use your imaginations, enjoy!

Welcome to the last of our series with Paddy! Today, with the good weather, he’s moving back outdoors again!

Hello everyone 😄 Well done for all the fantastic art work you have been doing over the past few weeks. We are so impressed with how creative you all are.

For your art challenge this week you can design and create a robot using any materials that you have at home. You could use items that you no longer need or use anymore. You could use items that you were going to throw away in the bin. You could borrow an item just while you are making your robot and then return it after. Be as creative as you can! 😊

Have a look at some of these examples of recycled robots to give you some inspiration for your project.

Send in any pictures of your robots to your teacher on Class Dojo or to the school WhatsApp. We can wait to see what you come up with 😃

Inniu, tá Kahoot! nua againn. Tá sé faoin aimsir agus bunaithe ar na cheisteanna a d’fhoghlaim muid mar chuid ‘frása an lae’.

An – mhaith le gach duine a dhéanann na Kahoots! gach seachtain, tá ag éirí go hiontach libh go léir!

Seo an nasc:

https://kahoot.it/challenge/01152218?challenge-id=70a33956-23c0-42d9-b553-19def0288b68_1614292070996

Bain úsáid as d’ainm fíor le do thoil! Use your real name please!

Hello everyone and welcome to our next creative challenge!

Your responses to the question ‘what is creativity’? where so imaginative and unique, we’re sure we’re going to hear and receive amazing suggestions as we start to write and draw a story as a whole school!

Take a look at the video below that Bex has sent to us and get involved by answering the question and submitting your illustrations via Class Dojo or here on the school blog.

We can’t wait to hear what creative and imaginative story lines you come up with and hope that all classes get involved!

Well done to everyone for sending in such lovely pictures for their art challenge this week! Have a look at some of the creations by this very talented bunch 😄

Well done everyone for your great work 😄