The Bens had a phenomenal opportunity to take a trip to the newly-opened National Robotarium. Ben Lomond and Ben Lawers had the most amazing day being ambassadors for our school, showing off their robotics and coding knowledge, and exploring new AI technologies.
Please see the Sway created by Ben Lomond all about their trip:
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At Calderwood we pride ourselves in being at the cutting edge of practice, pedagogy and research. With this in mind, we are currently working with Alana Wilks at Heriot-Watt as part of our Engineering IDL topic.
We are taking part in a number of activities designed by Alana, which will stimulate skills and knowledge around the topic of engineering. In order to further research in this field we hope that parents and guardians would fill out online forms and support our pupils in home learning engineering tasks. Alana’s research topic is ‘The perception of engineering in children and parents from ethnic minority backgrounds‘ and the online forms are around this topic. We would be hugely grateful if as many Bens’ Parents and Guardians could explore the online forms and home learning.
There are two forms to fill out:
Watch this space to see some of the activities and thinking from the Bens displayed shortly!
Maths Week Scotland is just around the corner which means – Sumdog Competition time!
The contest will begin at 8 am on Friday 23rd September and end on Thursday 29th September. Your child can access the competition by clicking here or logging in via the following link and using their unique username, password, and school code Calderwood2:
https://www.sumdog.com/user/sign_in
This competition is a fantastic way to compete against lots of other Primary students, have fun and develop numeracy/maths skills at the very same time. Your child has received a card which includes their unique username and password to keep safe at home. If you have any issues with accessing Sumdog or using the details on the card please do get in touch with the school office as we’d be more than happy to assist.
Your child may be set some questions which they whizz through at the start. Completing these will support them to answer appropriate questions during the Competition so please do hang in there and complete them!
Today we were delighted to host the Primary Science Development Officers from authorities across Scotland. They were all given a tour of our school building and heard all about the amazing STEM learning which is going on every day at Calderwood Primary School!
Click here to see the Sway for yourself and catch up on the highlights from a Year of STEM at Calderwood.
The West Calder High School Cluster Cross Country Competition took place on 24th May 2022 and saw the children from Ben Lomond Clan take on 1.3km of undulating terrain. All the children in this Clan completed the race, hit the targets they had set for themselves and showed huge positivity throughout.
The results are in and we are delighted to announce that a child from Ben Lomond Clan came first in the Boys Race! As a result, they will be attending the Pan-West Lothian event next session to compete against the winners of the other Primary School Clusters.
Many thanks to Kat Stark and all at Active Schools West Calder for organising the event and supporting us on the day.
Last term, to begin our celebration of British Science Week 2022, the Ben Clans created a STEM takeover for each Clan in our school! The groups created a variety of lessons to deliver to the younger clans. Tay Clan learned about the skeleton, Rannoch Clan learned all about space and our solar system, Ness created scrap robots and used a sphero to move the robot, Bluebell Clan looked at the layers of the Earth and Bramble focussed on food chains in our oceans. Mull, Shetland and Orkney developed an understanding of space, star constellations and the universe.
The experience generated a lot of discussion around earth, space and the universe, informing the direction of learning for this term.
Our cross curricular topic this term is science based and will be looking at the origins of life and the habitability of earth and other planets. We began this week by watching a short clip narrated by David Attenborough about the tree of life and then researched the evolution of a penguin, inputting our research onto Padlet. Please click here to see our research.
Alongside this, we will also began understanding the different viewpoints offered in the creation stories from different world religions. We started this week with the Christian creation story and began to understand that there are similarities with that and the creation story in Judaism. We created our own versions of the Judeo-Christian creation story using powerpoint, imovies including greenscreen and SWAY.
Literacy
We are beginning to learn about the features and structure of narrative writing. We have been exploring our reading books to develop our understanding of the orientation, complication and resolution found within this genre of text. This week, we had a go at writing a narrative based around a theme of racing. We looked at a good example and deconstructed it so we could understand how to write one ourselves. One of the Bens wrote a story called ‘The Horse Race’. It is a good example as it has a clear orientation stating who, when and where; the complication is clear and includes direct speech and accurate punctuation and the resolution explains what happens and solves the problem, bringing the story to a conclusion.
We are excited about the term ahead and look forward to sharing with you soon. Watch this space!!
The Bens 🙂
Good luck to all our amazing Calderwood Primary School Children, they have now been entered into the West Lothian Sumdog Maths Contest!
The contest will begin at 8 am on Friday 13th and end on Thursday 19th May. Your child can access the competition by clicking here or logging in via the following link and using their unique username and password along with the school code Calderwood2:
https://www.sumdog.com/user/sign_in
This competition is a fantastic way to compete against lots of other Primary students, have fun and develop numeracy/maths skills at the very same time. If your child has forgotten their details, please do get in touch with the school office as we’d be more than happy to assist.
We are extremely proud to announce that an invention created by a child from Ness Clan won the East of Scotland for their age category. Their invention, The Automatic Pencil, will be displayed at the University of Edinburgh Exhibition on 18th May and they will also recieve their certificate and trophy at an Award Ceremony later that day.
We had a huge number of entries of an extremely high standard so all children involved in the If you were an engineer what would you do? competition should be extremely proud of themselves. A special thanks also goes to Mr Clarke (Calderwood Parent) for giving the children in Ness, Rannoch and Tay Clans inspiration to begin inventing through presenting to the clans on the topic of his STEM career.
If you would like to find out more about this award please click here.
Today we had great fun in Calderwood Primary School celebrating World Book Day. To spread the love of reading even further your child will have a £1 book token which you can find out more about by clicking here.
To celebrate World Book Day, the Ben Clans were able to be reading buddies with Mull, Orkney and Shetland Clans. The younger children became authors this morning as they wrote all about space. This fun was shared by the older children too, they were given time to free-write and could share this with their buddies later in the day.
Mull Clan, Bens Lawers and Ben Lomond:
Orkney, Bens Lawers and Ben Lomond
Shetland, Bens Lawers and Ben Lomond
In Ness and Rannoch Clan the children have been learning about different setting in books. To celebrate World Book Day they searched the libraries to find books with different setting and then used new and exciting adjectives to describe the settings they found.
Huge good luck to all our amazing Calderwood Primary School Children, they have now been entered into the West Lothian Sumdog Maths Contest! The contest will run between Friday 11th March and Thursday 17th March. Your child can access the competition by logging in via the following link and using their unique username and password along with the school code Calderwood2:
https://www.sumdog.com/user/sign_in
This competition is a fantastic way to compete against lots of other Primary students, have fun and develop numeracy/maths skills at the very same time. If your child has forgotten their details, please do get in touch with the school office as we’d be more than happy to assist.
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