Cars, Teddies, snakes and Robert Sheehan - typical TY!

Here's a few more blogs to read.

Katie's looking for followers for her F1 in School team Rápido y Furioso,

Ciara's all Teddy Bears and Crumble,

Shannon gets up close and personal with a snake at the BTYSE!

and 

Megan's in love with Robert Sheehan. Incase we don't know who he is, Lauren shows us who they are talking about!

TY's have been updating their blogs

Back to school after christmas and the TY's have been updating their blogs - just in time for the 3rd Years who will be checking the blogs in the process of deciding if they should do TY next year or not.

Read these blogs to find out what we've been up to since December:

Aoibhinn's TY blog

Ciara's TY Blog Xperience 

Lisa's TY blog 

Shannon's wild adventure

BT Young Scientist Exhibition 2012

On the 11th of January 2012 12 students from TY were off to the BT Young Scientist exhibition.
The entire TY year applied for the competition back in October but it was the 12 girls, within 4 groups, that had the privilege of attending the competition for 4 days.

Another trip to the Young Scientist Exhibition

Happy New Year!

First week of school is over and we are back at full speed. This week ended with a trip to the Young Scientist Exhibition in Dublin, for all TY's and 2nd Year students, where we had 5 Transition Year groups competing.

Aoife has advice for new TYs

Aoife wrote a really good post giving advice to any student going into TY next year, I thought it important to put here so the 3rd Years will read it.

"What's So Good about TY?

As Mrs. Leahy has directed future transition year students to explore our blogs and gather more information about the whole TY experience I decided that I would make a post dedicated to

Teenage Beauty....At what cost??

Rachel tells us something about her Young Scientist project.......

"As part of our TY Science curriculum we have to enter the BT Young Scientist Competition. We were all split into groups at the beginning of the year and given some time to decide what we wanted to do for our project. I was teamed with Hayley and so far things are going great, although we have all been warned that most groups disagree at some point!!!

We have decided to base our project on how the beauty products we use today affect our bodies both now and in the long run. We have made a survey asking students of all ages about their beauty regime, what products they use etc.

We are also going to create our own moisturiser or other beauty product that people can use as an alternative to the retailed product. This product will be 100% organic and will be made in accordance to the answers we get from the surveys.

I'm really looking forward to working on this project and can't wait until we start to experiment and make our own product. I'll keep you updated as we progress with our project. Fingers crossed we might actually get through to the competition!

xoxo Rachel "

That sounds very interesting Rachel. Good luck with the research.
Mrs L

First month of TY finished!

Grace posted this on her TY blog and I've copied it here. She seems to be enjoying her TY experience.
Mrs L

First month of TY nearly finished; & so far it has been really fun, I’ve laughed so much throughout it, :)

On Monday the 20th of September we all went to Naas to the Moat theatre and discussed setting up our businesses in Mini Company, my group has a few good ideas for it but nothing is set yet.

In Science we are still questioning our one-page proposal for the Young Scientist competition. It’s hard work.

All last week was Friendship week and in Religion we had to make an outline of our hand and pass it around the room so everyone could write a positive comment on you, I got back a lot of nice things, thankfully, haha. Also on Friday we had our annual Fun Run. Transition Year’s colour was yellow and we were all wearing yellow t-shirts. We made up a dance, and we won!
Even though it’s Transition Year, it’s still very tiring.
Grace D

In School Science Competition

Today, in triple science, the science teachers announced the winners of the in school science competition. There were some great prizes won, like boxes of Celebrations and vouchers for Liffey Valley. Prizes were given to the students who got through to the BT Young Scientist, and also to students who the teachers thought deserved a prize for all their hard work. The teachers judged our projects in 3 areas.

Scientific Content.
Presentation of the project.
The originality of the idea.

The overall winners were Ali Bell and Eileen Maher. They did a project about fake tan, which was quite original. Although they did not get through to the BT Young Scientist, they continued working away on their project and even went to Maynooth College to complete it!

Ms Barry came down to give out the prizes and to look at our posters which were displayed on the walls of the demo room.

After the prizes were given out, we watched "Creation" which is all about Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and his life. The teachers had kindly bought us chocolates, lolliops, crisps and fizzy drinks to reward us for our hard work.

Overall, it was a great few hours! Thank you Ms. Ward, Ms. Healy and Ms. Coogan for such a great afternoon! :)
- Sarah McE .xo

Pamela's Young Scientist experience

The BT Young Scientist and Technology exhibition was held from the 12th – 16th January.

Myself and the girls from the other four projects that were accepted woke up at six o’ clock on Wednesday morning not knowing what to expect. Several bus rides later, we reached the RDS and went in to register. It was only then that we found out that we didn’t have to be there until twelve. This was at HALF EIGHT.

After registering, getting our free stuff, making new friends and setting up our projects we headed out for some lunch.

After our lunch we came back to our first judging. The judges were a lot friendlier than I thought they would be. After the stress of the judging we went off to make some friends. We met people from Cork, Limerick, Galway, Tyrone, Donegal, Roscommon, Louth and our neighbour, Dublin.

On the first night we had a disco, but we all only had jeans and a jumper so we thought we might be a bit underdressed, but in the end it turned out that most people just wore their uniforms. Shannon and I started off dancing and it started a trend. After ten minutes, everybody in the room was on their feet and the night turned out to be a blast! I didn’t make it home until half eleven, and had to get up at half five the next morning!

The next day, I was suffering from sleep deprivation and that’s when Caoimhe and I decided that we’d stay in a hotel. We booked the hotel and went home to pack our gear. Although we were only staying for two nights, being girls, we brought bags and bags of clothes!

We had the table quiz that night and we thought it was hopeless considering we were in a room filled with scientists, but surprise surprise... WE CAME THIRD! (:

The school came on the Friday and all the girls came to look at our projects. Mr Lawlor took pictures of me, and now they’re on the school website, CRINGE.

The whole week was completely amazing. We made new friends and I just can’t wait to go back next year :D
Pamela

In School Science Competition

During our triple science class, all the TY's were given the opportunity to display and present their BT Young Scientist projects. All of the four groups that got through to the competition in the RDS and all the other entries got to show off all the hard work they have been doing in science since September and present their projects to the rest of the year group.

Everyone found the projects so interesting, there were some really great ideas and the hard work that everyone put in really paid off.

Nice work girls! =p

Ellie xox

Young Scientist Exhibition

Well, TY's were back at school today after their Young Scientist trip last week to the RDS. They were full of talk about the Exhibition and were really impressed by some of the exhibitors there. There was a lot of talk about the different school uniforms that they saw and most girls thought that St Wolstans uniform wasn't too bad after all!!

Pamela is going to write something for the blog about her experience as an exhibitor and hopefully someone else will write about the exhibition as a visitor. They met so many famous people and took so many photographs, hopefully some will be shared here. A few girls even managed to be interviewed by TG4.

Mrs L

My Young Scientist project

This year so far, we have been working on our B.T. Young Scientist Exhibition projects. Everyone has divided into small groups to work on their individual projects. Eimear McCarthy and I are researching “The Medical Properties of Sea Air.”

We have written a letter to Met Eireann requesting information on different aspects of sea air, and we have carried out surveys in the school. We will soon visit coastal areas to carry out experiments relating to pressure, humidity and various other properties of sea air.

We sent our detailed one page proposal to the panel of judges for the Exhibition, but unfortunately we were not accepted for the exhibition in January.

We continue to do our project for an in-school competition next year though.

I am enjoying working on my science project and I feel that is a really good opportunity to research an area of particular interest to you.

Sophie O' Carroll