St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

In aistear this fortnight senior infants have been focusing on the theme of ‘myself’ through participating in ‘talent show’ themed work in all subjects.  We had a talent showcase performance this afternoon where, for the first time, the whole class got to perform their special talents to the rest of the class who were the audience.  We were treated to an amazing show!  Have a look at some moments from the talent show below.

The girls doing jigs and reels

Other talents included  a mini karate lesson, football skills and a roaring lion.  What an enjoyable afternoon!

Next fortnight we will be working on the theme of ‘the hospital’.

We are delighted to welcome our new Litter and Waste Committee to the Green schools team in Peter’s.

We are excited to keep up the great work of the former committee who are now focusing on Energy for our next flag.

We especially welcome our two youngest members  who are in senior infants and who have been heavily involved so far in litter picking and looking after junior infant waste management.

We are looking forward to a fun year ahead with Green Schools!

We’ve had a busy week in First Class so far this year!

We took pictures on our first day. We can’t wait to look back on these at the end of the year to see how much we have grown.

First Class are very good at jigsaws!

We made minions in art. First class are definitely one in a “minion!” 🙂

Our first litter pick of the year with this enthusiastic bunch! So much litter had accumulated over the summer but we are delighted to be on top of it again. Great to see the compost developing also! pic.twitter.com/9pwdiAM1lk

— St. Peter's Primary (@StPetersBray) September 5, 2018

Senior infants showing what they can do during literacy stations! Great start to the new school year pic.twitter.com/uA2QT0zfHo

— St. Peter's Primary (@StPetersBray) September 3, 2018

On the 31st of May Senior Infants went on their very first school tour to Glenroe Farm. We had such an amazing day at the petting area, fairy walk and the play ground.  Just look at all the smiling faces in our lovely photos

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Welcome to our submission for the Discover Primary Science and Maths award for 2018. This is our 13^th 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 4th 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. This year, we did a whole school experiment involving our garden. You can read all about it below. It has been great to see the improvements we can make towards helping our school think about sustainability.

Yet again, a huge amount of work has gone into this. Every class in the whole school has taken part in this application, well done to all the pupils and teachers! For the sixth year in a row, we are using our blog to submit our award and to link back to our activities that have taken part during the year. Our SFI Award number this year is WW013.

Step 1: Science

For this step, we carried out six hands-on Science investigations under the four different strands in classes throughout the school. We also tried to include Maths in these investigations where possible, linking in with Step 4.

• Energy and Forces: 1st Class learned all about static electricity.  Read all about their experiment here.
• Living Things: Junior and Senior Infants both planted seeds as part of the experiments. It was great to watcch them grow! You can read all about their experimenst here (for Junior Infants) and here (for Senior Infants).
• Environmental Awareness and Care: As a school, we undertook a schoolwide experiment to try and improve our school garden, with the focus on making it a more welcoming place to pollinators. A huge amount of work went in to this experiment and we were delighted to see an increase in bees, as well as bugs and insects. You can read about their experiment here.
• Energy and Forces: 2nd Class used their STEM skills to design and make bridges. You can read all about their great experiment here.
• Materials: 3rd Class learned all about light and worked on what the best light shade would look like. You can read all about their great work here!
• Energy and Forces: 4th Class learned all about friction, using ramps at different heights and materials here.
• Energy and Forces: 5th Class were experimenting with heat. You can check out their fun investigation here.
• Energy and Forces: 6th Class had great fun designing and making rollercoasters and float planes. You can read all about these STEM activities here.

Boys and girls from 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th class took part in the First Lego League again this year thanks to Mr. Kinsella and Mr. Foley, in partnership with Salesforce. You can read all about the huge effort that went in to planning for their trip to Galway here.

You can also read all about our Space Week activites here and here!

6th Class also took part in the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition, which you can read all about here.

Step 2: Technology

In the second step, we had to ensure that technology was used by our pupils. As a previous winner of the Junior Spider Awards, technology has become a part of every-day life in St. Peter’s. We were also awarded the Digital School of Distinction award, which showcased the effort and time we put in incorporating technology into our daily school lives.

Mr. Kinsella and Mr. Foley ran an after school club which culminated in our school taking part in the FIRST Lego League in Galway. It was a superb experience yet again for the boys and girls which you can read about here.

Throughout all the other classes in the school, pupils of every age have also used cameras, laptops, animoto, and this blog, as well as apps such as vine and twitter, to showcase the work that they have been doing during the course of the year. As you can see from our submission this year, we have continued to implement technology in our day-to-day teaching and learning, with Maths and Science at the forefront of this. You can check out all of our tweets from the year @stpetersbray!

Step 3: Engineering

For the third step of our application for the DPSM Plaque of STEM Excellence, we have had a big focus on the Design and Make element of Science. Our staff have worked previously in conjunction with St. Patrick’s College regarding professional development in STEM. A big part of this focused on the Design and Make process, and helped us make sure STEM was an integral part of our engineering activities. An example of how we look to incorporate STEM into our lessons can be seen here, where 2nd Class made their own bridges!

We include two examples of our Design and Make lessons as part of our application. As you can see from our blog post by 6th Class here, we have numerous examples of engineering taking place in our school across many classes during Engineers Week.

Step 4: Maths

Throughout our Science investigations, we incorporated Maths where possible, For example, 4th learned about measue and used charts to record their results here, and 6th Class used mathematical skills to record their rollercoaster experiment, which you can read about here.

Step 5: STEM Showcase

6^th Class took part yet again in the BT Young Scientist Exhibition in the RDS in January this year. This year they investigated rollercoasters. As always, they put a lot of effort into their submission, and presented it brilliantly on the day. You can read about their work here.

We hoped you enjoyed reading our submission!

In Senior Infants we were learning all about what happens to the flowers and plants in Spring time.

We decided to grow our very own little seed pots in our classroom.

First we had a class discussion on:

1. What does a plant need to grow?
2. Are any of these things more important than the others?
3. What happens if a plant doesn’t get enough water, heat, light or food?
4. Can a plant get too much of a good thing? What might happen if it does?
5. How similar are plants to people? What do we need if we’re going to grow up strong?

YOU WILL NEED:

Seeds

Plant pots

A bag of compost

Water

Our Instructions 

1. Place soil in the cup and make a small hole for your seeds.
2. Add seeds into the cup.
3. Cover seeds.
4. Water seeds
5. Place in sunlight

To helped our plants to grow,  we moved them around the classroom to help keep them in the sun light.

Here are our photos of us planting and growing our seeds. We also measured our stems every day to see if they have grown.

Here we are putting our soil and seeds into our pots.

We watered our flower pots  at the start and at the end of every day.

We went on a Spring Nature walk to see the new plants and buds on the leaves, this walk really helped us to see different kinds of plants as they start to grow.

FINALLY,  after a few weeks our seeds had grown and filled out pots. Just in time to be taken home for St. Patrick’s Day.

4^th class conducted an experiment on the effects of different heights and materials on the speed of toy cars. We watched a range of videos as a stimulus and get us thinking on different heights.

We then wanted to see if this was actually true. We wrote up our opinions as a class on what we thought would be the outcome. We used a variety of materials including toy cars (different types-large and small), ramps, school books and a metre stick.

At the end of the lesson we came to the conclusion in our results that the higher the ramp the further the car would go on the ramp and onto a flat surface. We had a wide range of lengths which we could calculate with our metre stick.

Secondly we then tested the effects of different surfaces on the car. We used carpet, sandpaper and felt like materials. We as a class felt the texture of the materials first and then decided our opinions on which surface would be the best one.

First Class have been learning all about static electricity this week in Science. Firstly we talked about the difference between static electricity and current electricity.

The children shared times when they experienced static electricity like when they touched a hand rail and got a shock or heard crackling noises when they took off woolly jumpers. We talked about why this happens.

The children experimented with static electricity by rubbing balloons on their hair to make it stand up!

We wanted to investigate which piece of the school uniform produces the best ‘static’. The children split into groups and each picked an item of clothing that they were wearing like jumpers, t-shirts, trousers, dresses.  Each group was given a balloon, 5 small pieces of torn paper and a sheet to record their results. To make it a fair test we all agreed each group would rub the balloon on their chosen piece of clothing the same amount of times.  The groups counted together while their partners produced the static electricity.

We found out that the best material to produce static electricity from our uniforms was our trousers. We displayed our results on a graph on the board.