St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

With all the excitement of Christmas we thought we would do a festive experiment. Our questions –Which liquid will cause our candy cane to disappear the fastest?

To conduct our experiment, we needed: 4 glasses, 4 candy canes, vinegar, warm water, milk and cold water.

We labelled our 4 clear glasses and then filled them with warm water, cold water, milk and vinegar making sure to put the same amount of liquid in each glass.

Then, we made predictions. The vast majority thought the warm water would melt the candy cane the quickest!

We put one candy cane in each cup and watched to see what would happen.

Within 2 minutes all three candy canes were starting to turn the liquids pink or red. It was definitely magic!

We observed the four glasses and compared the reactions. After break, we had our results and we could determine if our predictions were correct or not.

The cup with the warm water was the fastest liquid to make the candy cane dissolve.

The vinegar cup was the first liquid to remove all the red from the candy cane.

The cold water and milk removed the colour and disappeared but more slowly than other two liquids.

Next, we recorded our observations and results. We learned lots of new vocabulary words such as dissolve, prediction, result.

Even more interestingly and in the interest of science we discovered later that the quickest way to make a candy cane disappear was to eat it!!!

6th class have had a great month celebrating Anti – Bullying month during November.

It’s so important to celebrate this month in school in order to raise awareness about bullying and the many different forms it can take.

As senior students in our school, we feel a responsibility to lead by example and make sure that our school is an open, welcoming and inclusive place to be.

Some of the activities we took part in included walking debates about bullying, identifying trusted individuals who can help us if we are being bullied or know someone that is, a talk with a local Garda about cyberbullying and group work to discuss various scenarios that we might find ourselves in and what are appropriates ways to act and react.

We had a great time investigating and discussing all things scientific this year!

One of our favourite activities was when we linked our PE lesson with Science. We decided we would investigate our heart rates and the impact that certain exercises and activities have on our heart rate.

To begin with, we discussed and took our ‘resting’ heart rates. This was a little bit tricky at first (some of us were worried we didn’t have any 😅) but after some perseverance we became comfortable calculating them. We did this by counting the beats per minute we could feel on our wrists (use your right index and middle finger on the palm side of your left wrist) and necks (just below our ears and jawbones) – we counted for 15 seconds and then multiplied by 4 to get the BPM. We questioned why some heart rates are different and considered variables such as age, amount of exercise done daily and perhaps feeling nervous, stressed or indeed, relaxed.

We recorded these resting heart rate scores, and decided on some exercises that we wanted to put to the test, over the course of 1 minute each! We chose running, mini basketball, jumping jacks, throwing a ball and speed walking. We also made some predictions, including what exercises would raise our heartrates most and what we should observe after completing all 5 exercises. We decided to do the exercises outside and brought a stopwatch and our notebooks to record our results.

Our results were interesting and differed depending on the individual. We also think the order of the exercises may have affected our heart rates. For example, doing running and jumping jacks in a row, meant that our heart rates tended to stay up for longer.

Exercise and physical activity causes the heart rate to increase in order to supply the muscles with more oxygen to produce extra energy. Cardio/ running had the greatest effect on increasing the heart rates of the majority of class, as you can see from our results.

We’re going to take part in some mindfulness exercises next, to see what effect relaxation has on our heart rates.

November has been Anti-Bullying month in St. Peter’s. Each week for the month Junior Infants have been engaging in activities to learn more about what bullying is and what we can do if we or someone we know is being bullied. We discussed and watched videos on different bullying scenarios and how people might feel in different situations.

We talked about how as individuals we can achieve success but working together as a team and class we can be be even better.
We added some team work skills into our lessons like Cross the Arctic in PE and created a colourful collage to show what we can do when we work together.

Thankfully bullying isn’t a problem for us in St. Peter’s. In Junior Infants we have been working really hard on getting along, sharing and being a team since the start of the year.

https://forms.gle/ntEBhufEhMdt3Fun8

Junior Infants were very excited about Science Week. This week, along with STEM for Fun we got to explore magnets and how they work. Early in the week we explored magnetism. We talked about what magnets are and watched a short video on magnetism. We then investigated things that were magnetic by testing our magnets out around the school and yard outside.

During Aistear we got to explore magnets and magnetic objects more. We used magnets to test items that might be magnetic and categorise items that were magnetic and non magnetic.

Finally at the end of the week we looked at a group of items as a class and use our prediction sheets to draw and try to predict which items were magnetic and which were not. We then tested these out to see if our predictions were correct.

This week in 5th class, we has great fun doing lots of different experiments to celebrate science week!

We have been learning all about the respiratory system and what happens to the body when we breathe. We completed a STEM activity and created our own model of the lungs to show how they work when we breathe!

https://youtube.com/shorts/t1nGcD6ev28

We investigated pitch using glasses and some water. We wanted to find out how to make the highest and lowest sound we could.

1. We placed all our glasses in a line. We used glasses of the same size and shape to make sure it was a fair test.
2. We used a pencil to hit the empty glasses. We listened to the sound.
3. Next, we added different amounts of water to each glasses. We hit the glasses with a pencil again and listened.
4. We discovered that the more water in the glass, the lower the sound we made. The less water in the glass, the higher the sound.

We also spent some time researching famous scientists and the work that they carried out!

We had a great week and learned a lot about science!

We had great fun this week during Science week making a bubbly mess in class. The children created their potions in groups and watched as the bicarbonate of soda made the potion bubble higher and higher until one potion overflowed!!

5th and 6th class went on a trip to Glasnevin Cemetery. We had a tour guide who showed us the graves of some historical fugures in Irish history, such as Daniel O’ Connell, Michael Collins and Eamon De Valera. We heard stories of the 1916 Easter Rising, the Irish Civil War and rebellion!
We learned lots of information and we had a great day!

We have been working hard in 3rd class with our science week activities. We are learning about space this month. We made these rockets using just paper, tape and a straw! Have a look at our blast off 🚀👨‍🚀👩‍🚀