Dundee Clan had a fantastic time at their Christmas party. We created a playlist together with all of our favourite party tunes and loved dancing to them. We played musical bumps and corners which was great fun. We enjoyed some food and a drink together in the café which was well-deserved after all that dancing. We are well and truly in the Christmas mood.
The Water Cycle
As part of our learning about the Rainforest we explored the Water Cycle. We learnt words such as evaporation, condensation and precipitation. We discussed what each word means and what takes place at each of these points in the cycle. We created a water cycle in a bag experiment and placed it on our clan window. Hopefully we will see the water cycle in action.
Money
We have been learning about money. We have been revising the coins and notes we use, totalling money amounts and making amounts in different ways. We also created our own shops with items and prices displayed and went shopping in each other’s shops, recording items we would like to purchase, noting their cost. We discussed totalling amounts and starting with adding the pounds first and then the pence finding that this was an efficient strategy to use.
Dundee clan have had a great week celebrating Book Week Scotland. We made a collaborative poster of ‘The Magic Faraway Tree’ which is our class novel and have displayed this in our Discovery Den.
We also enjoyed a visit from a real-life author- Jo Wilcox who shared one of her stories with us.
On Friday, We dressed up as some of our favourite characters from books and enjoyed a book tasting session with our families. We were able to share some of our learning about the rainforest too. We shared our animal factfiles, our rainforest story and our layers of the rainforest flip book.
Dundee Clan have got off to a great start in term 2. We began our learning about the rainforest through reading the book ‘The Great Kapock Tree’ by Lynne Cherry. We loved listening to this and had so many questions and wonders that we want to explore further. So far, we have learnt about the 7 continents in the world, where rainforests are in the world, why they are so warm and wet and what animals live there through exploring habitats. We were surprised to learn that there is more than one rainforest in the world and that people live in the rainforest! We look forward to learning more.
We have really enjoyed our visits from Mrs De Luen from NYCOS – The National Youth Choir of Scotland. We have learnt about keeping the beat in music, rhythm in music using notation and words to support us, and the pitch in music identifying high and low sounds as well as being introduced to notation. We played lots of games to support our learning and particularly loved having the parachute out.
We are learning about a new genre of writing – narrative writing (story writing). We are confident with the purpose, structure and language features of this genre and have had a go at creating a scary story – The Haunted House, together as a clan. We loved learning about onomatopoeia words and how these types of words can add excitement and interest to our story writing. We are looking forward to creating narrative texts based in the rainforest.
For all parents and children of Dundee Clan,
Please click on the TEAMS guide below to access a PDF file of how to access and use TEAMS at home. The guide explains how to log-in, how to access files and how to access class notebook. I hope you all find this useful.
Term 1
We have had an extremely busy and exciting term 1 in Dundee Clan. Please click on the links to access all the sways which show our learning and hard-work for the term. These can also be found in TEAMS in the relevant folders.
Calderwood Can Explorers: https://sway.office.com/FlL3Pa94r8njCymc?ref=Link
Calderwood Communicates: https://sway.office.com/ahKrI0qWNH2GW9SK?ref=Link
Calderwood Counts: https://sway.office.com/f6fvZSk9mDTIEmHF?ref=Link
Calderwood Cares: https://sway.office.com/06aSfHkt0KTYWg0w?ref=Link
Calderwood Clan Explorers
Throughout the first term we have been exploring our namesake clan ‘Dundee’. We completed some research to find out where Dundee is located in Scotland and what important landmarks can be found there. We explored the Tay Bridge, the RRS Discovery ship, the V & A museum and Broughty Castle. We completed research through reading and researching online. We presented our findings to the rest of our clan.
In Maths, we discussed the rules of 1-line of symmetry. We practised this skill by using pictures of different landmarks from Dundee and drawing the other half of the picture to make sure it was symmetrical. We loved this. We realised a lot of buildings are symmetrical and discussed how this skill is used in architecture in the world of work.
We have been learning how to identify the location of a landmark on a map by using grid references.
Finally, we created a cityscape of Dundee. We explored warm and cool colours, discussing how these make us feel and how they are seen in a sunset. We created our sunset pictures using watercolours discussing how to blend the colours together. We explored how much water is needed to get the colour just right. After our pictures dried, we cut out our chosen Dundee landmark from black sugar paper to make our cityscape, These are displayed in our cabin and look beautiful.
Please click on the link to look at our Calderwood Clan Explorer Sway.
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https://sway.office.com/FlL3Pa94r8njCymcref
Dundee Clan began their writing journey by exploring description writing.
We completed our first piece of writing, describing our favourite animal. We remembered to use the describing bubble to support us which reminds us to describe size, colour, texture, position, number, shape and what our animal does.
We explored the structure of description writing and learnt the names and purpose of the different sections in a description text. We have come up with hand signals to represent each section which will help us remind us about the order in which to build our descriptive pieces of writing.
Finally, we explored the language features of a description text, looking closely at the nouns, adjectives and pronouns, recording them in a grid that we can refer to later when writing our own descriptions.
We will continue to explore this genre of writing further by writing description texts and exploring descriptive passages in our reading lessons.
Bramble clan are well under way with their new IDL ‘Cultivating Calderwood’.
We have been learning about the water cycle through reading and decided to create our own water cycle in a bag. We added our predictions of what we might see happen on to a post-it note and then discussed what was happening and learnt about the process of the Water Cycle.
Next, we have been looking at recycling and what reduce, reuse, recycle means. We did some note-taking in our reading lessons and then created posters about what we had learnt about these 3 areas. We are more aware of what we do already and what we might do to look after our planet by recycling. We have chosen to create art from items that need recycled as part of our home learning grid.
We planted sunflowers and have positioned them in our area on the windowsill. We are going to plot their growth on a labelled line graph. After day 13, we have seen a lot of growth and are very excited to see these each day, especially after the weekend. One of our pupils has planted an orange seed he brought in from home to see if it will grow. We planted 2 in different conditions – 1 in soil with water and sunlight and 1 with water and sunlight only. So far none of them have grown. We will continue to monitor this.
We planted some seeds at the end of last term, in our school garden and discussed what a plant needs to grow. We applied this knowledge to explore what a sunflower needs to grow and what the life cycle of a sunflower might look like. We drew the life cycle of a sunflower, showing each stage of its life and what it will look like. These are displayed on our IDL learning wall in our corridor.
Art
We explored different art methods in different clans with Mrs Scobie, Miss Ali or Miss Quinn. With Miss Quinn, we looked at 1 point perspective art looking out of a greenhouse towards a house. With Mrs Scobie we looked at 1-point perspective looking into a greenhouse. With Miss Ali, we used watercolours to draw flowers. We were very pleased with our results. These are displayed in our area.
Finally, we have been exploring the different parts of a flower. We have learnt the names of each part, their purpose and what they look like. To look at these and identify these in real life, we dissected a tulip. We then placed each of the parts on a flower lab mat, stating the length and purpose of each. We enjoyed this exploration and even extracted pollen from the stamen. We were fascinated to find out that a flower has both male and female parts.
We have been extremely busy and are so excited to learn more!
Bramble Clan had a fantastic trip to the Glasgow Science centre in Term 3 alongside Bluebell and Thistle. There was much excitement on the bus and we loved all the hands on activites. The I-max Cinema experience was incredible, taking us on a 3D experience on a real space station.
Please take a look at the bottom of this sway to see us in action on our trip.
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