S4 pupil, Mackenzie, visited New York earlier this month with the North Lanarkshire Schools Pipe Band. The Band led the Tartan Day Parade in Bryant Park and were a huge hit in Grand Central Station!
Category Archives: news
World Book Day Competition
Well done to Mason and Jay who won our World Book Day competition for the funniest joke and book review. Thank you to everyone who participated – we loved reading all your jokes.
Fire Reach Course 2019
S3 pupils from Calderhead High and Taylor High School attended an intensive five day Fire Reach course with Scottish Fire and Rescue Services at Coatbridge Community Fire Station recently. The pupils learned about teamwork, resilience, health and safety and first aid as well as experiencing the role of being a firefighter. Well done boys!
YAY YA Festival 2019
The YAY YA Festival took place on 12 March and was a day of events dedicated to the “Teen Reads Scene of Scotland”.
Held in the iconic Cumbernauld Theatre, pupils were treated to talks and readings by many Scottish authors and were delighted to be able to meet them ‘up close’ and ask them questions about their writing.
The authors included:
Kirkland Ciccone has written many excellent young adult books and gave an extremely funny opening talk. Kirkland was also largely responsible for organising the Festival so deserves special thanks!
Ross Sayers writes the sort of ‘effortless cool fiction that teens should be reading’. He has published a novel for young adults called ‘Mary’s The Name’ and his new book will be coming out in May.
Alex Nye has written some wonderful ghost stories steeped in Scottish history. She has just published a book about Mary Queen of Scots which will no doubt apperaing in the Library soon!
Danny Weston/ Philip Caveney, revealed his dual identity to the group and gave us all shivers with his scary books, ‘The Slithers’ and ‘The Scarecrow’. His books are always popular with our readers in the Library!
LJ MacWhirter is the author of ‘Black Snow Falling’ which has been longlisted for CILIP Carnegie Award. ‘Black Snow Falling’ is set in the past (over 500 years ago) and sounds like a fantastic read!
Moira McPartlin is the author of the fantastic Sun Song Trilogy, including her new novel ‘Star of Hope’, which we can’t wait to read! Paul Murdoch‘s new book ‘Sunny’ tackles racial discrimination and we had a fascinating talk with him about his new book and a diverse range of subjects including Bali, the belt and sectarianism!
Pupils also got a chance to get their books signed by the authors and to take some selfies (as you can see!). We had a great day out and as well as encouraging eveyone to read more, I think we’ll have a few more aspiring writers!
BBC Scotland Young Reporter’s Day
For News Day (6th March) the Young Reporter team and BBC Scotland invited pupils from a handful of schools across Scotland to visit their iconic headquarters at Pacific Quay in Glasgow and pupils from Calderhead High School were delighted to accept the invitation.
The pupils were taught some of the skills of being a reporter and got the opportunity to put these into practice. They learned the background mechanics – Emma demonstrated that she was a natural using the autocue! The pupils got a chance to interview each other in the radio recording rooms before filming an interview with Fraser Gillan, star of the new BBC Scotland flagship programme, ‘The Nine’.
They also met the team behind ‘The Social’ and were intrigued to see the ‘post-it’ notice board with ideas for current and future features.
After lunch, the pupils were delighted to film an interview with BBC Weatherman, Christopher Blanchett, and you can see Sahand and Shakira’s interview by clicking here.
The pupils then learned more about evaluating sources and discovering ‘fake news’.
The pupils had a fantastic day and learned much about being young reporters. They are looking forward to implementing all this at Calderhead’s Young Reporters’ Club.
Scottish Youth Parliament Elections 2019
Calderhead High School pupils will be joining young people all over Scotland to cast their votes in the Scottish Youth Parliament elections, which are taking place from 15th to 28th March, 2019.
Elections for the SYP are held every two years and young people aged 14 to 25 are eligible to vote to elect Members of the Scottish Youth Parliament (MSYPs). The Scottish Youth Parliament is a politically-independent organisation that aims to represent the young people of Scotland. It is made up of around 150 young people aged from 14−25 across Scotland. Every constituency area can elect a MSYP to represent the views and opinions of young people. In addition some MSYPs also attend representing Voluntary Organisations. The SYP meets three times a year to listen to and recognise the issues that are most important to young people, ensuring that their voices are heard by decision-makers.
World Book Day 2019
Happy World Book Day!
We started our celebrations earlier this week when author Martin Stewart came into speak to our S2 pupils on Monday. Martin gave a great talk about how he became a writer and the inspiration for his books, before reading an extract from his latest novel, “The Sacrifice Box”. This visit was part funded by the Scottish Book Trust as part of their Live Literature programme.
World Book Tokens are being distributed to all the pupils in the school and are available to uplift from the Library. Here are just some of the £1 World Book Day books you can ‘buy’ with your token, as well as using it to get £1 off a full price book.
We are also running a World Book Day competition. This year the prize will go to the funniest joke and the best book review about a funny book. The competition closes next Friday (Red Nose Day).
Harry Potter Book Night Party 2019
Calderhead High School’s Library was transformed into Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardy to celebrate Harry Potter Book Night and pupils enjoyed a myriad of Harry Potter related activities. Mrs Crosbie started the event with an excellent Potions class, where pupils tried some magic experiments including catching goblin eggs, creating goblin slime and catching a bothersome poltergeist. Pupils were then ‘sorted’ into their various Hogwarts houses and visited Ollivander’s wand shop where they created their own magic wands. As Chinese New Year had taken place earlier that week, we were delighted to welcome Catherine Lumsden, a former Tianjin scholar, who taught us spells in Mandarin and some useful phrases to use when meeting Chinese wizards and witches. We finished the event with a spell casting competition and Robert and Logyne were worthy winners. A great time was had by all.
Calderhead’s Got Talent – 17 December 2018
You will have an opportunity to see some of our talented pupils at the “Calderhead’s Got Talent” show on Monday, 17th December 2018 at 7pm in the Assembly Hall.
Tickets cost £2 with funds going to the Beatson Cancer Charity. Please come along and support our very talented pupils.
Book Week Scotland
Book Week Scotland took place from Monday 19 – Sunday 25 November 2018. We are dedicated to promoting reading for pleasure and we enjoyed the excuse to drop everything and read!
Here are just some of the great events that took place over Book Week Scotland:
- The English department ran a sponsored Readathon for all S1-S2 pupils.
- S1 and S2 pupils who we made significant progress in reading, are avid readers or have shown signs of sustained effort in Literacy attended the ‘Book Bistro’ where they read as they sipped hot chocolate with marshmallows.
- the winners of our ‘Rebel’ creative writing contest were announced with Sarah in S1 and Hannah in S2 declared the winners. Robert and Mason (S1) and the Chelsea and Chelsea (S2) were runners up.
- Comic Book Club talked about some of our excellent Scottish comic book and graphic novelists.
- We hosted a ‘Drop Everything and Read’ event across the school where pupils were encouraged to read books, comics, revision notes, class textbooks … the aim was to get as many pupils reading in as many subjects as possible whilst learning at the same time.
- There was also be a reading lunch for S3-S6 in the library at lunchtime.
- Staff were treated to copies of the free “Rebel” short story collection produced by the Scottish Book Trust.
- The week ended with a special Scottish book group meeting at lunchtime.
