Author: Mrs Scobie

Description Writing

In Bramble Clan, we were given the challenge to write a description text about our favourite animal.  Through this piece of writing, we had to show what we knew already about how to write a description text.

To start, we listened to a description of an animal and had to guess what it might be and explain our reasons why.  Next, we listened to the description again and tried to draw what we thought it looked like.  We had to listen hard to the words in the description to support us with this.  We compared our drawings and discussed what words helped us to draw the animal and how some sentences could have given us a bit more information or detail.

We then embarked on our challenge of writing a description about our favourite animal.  We had to include what it was, what it looked like, what it did and why it was our favourite animal.

We enjoyed writing about this.  We will continue to learn about writing a description text to develop our understanding and writing skills further.

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Categorized as Bramble

Our Clan is a Family – Bramble

Our Clan is a Family

Over the last 2 weeks, Bramble Clan have been learning more about each other and have welcomed new children into our clan family.  Together we read ‘Our Class is a family’ and discussed that, during school days, we work and play together as a family.

One of our favourite activities was creating our class portraits.  First of all, we designed our own set of sunglasses and inside the sunglasses we wrote and drew about what we did in our Summer holidays.  Next, we followed a step by step guide on how to draw our self-portrait.  We had to look closely at the details of our faces to make sure we drew our portraits as close to real-life as possible.  Finally, we designed and created a t-shirt to go with our portraits.  In our t-shirt we drew and wrote all about ourselves including our favourite hobbies, family, favourite place in the world, favourite subject in school and 3 words to describe ourselves.  We have displayed our ‘family’ portraits in our clan room.  During our clan chat we were able to share our portraits with each other and learn more about each other.

We have discussed what we wanted to include in our clan room and have included a calm area with lovely, soft cushions and calming items to help us relax.  We have also begun to develop our library area with a selection of books and some magazines to explore and we will continue to develop this area to support us in our literacy learning.  We have enjoyed using these areas during DEAR (Drop Everything and Read) time.

We discussed our daily routines and jobs for in school and in our clan room.  We know that our clan family need to work together to make sure our day runs smoothly and that we all take responsibility for the different jobs that need to be done for the day.  We have been working together as a great team already!

Our final task, this week, was to look at developing and designing our clan charter.  We looked at a list of children’s rights and decided on those that are most important to us in the classroom.  Through this learning, we have decided on a list of rules and expectations to make sure that we respect these rights for ourselves and each other and have designed our clan charter which will be displayed in our Clan room.

It has been a fantastic two weeks and we have settled well into our new clan family.

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Categorized as Bramble

Rannoch Clan – Multiplication and Division

Rannoch clan have been learning about the different strategies we can use when multiplying and dividing such as making arrays, repeated addition/subtraction, skip counting and making equal groups.

This week, we explored the relationship between multiplication and division.  We created arrays, using different items, to show multiplication calculations and learnt that if we swap the numbers round, we get the same answer.  We explored even further and found that we could use the same array to find division facts.  This led us to exploring fact families.  We built arrays and found all the multiplication and division facts related to them and put these into our fact family houses.

We realised that a fact family is made up of 3 numbers and that we can solve division calculations if we know the related multiplication facts.  This might help us to solve division calculations more quickly.

Rannoch Clan Writing

Writing – The Naughty Troll

 Rannoch clan were shocked this week to find that one of their learning spaces was extremely messy and Mrs Scobie showed them a picture of the school playground with lots of litter lying around in it. Mrs Scobie suggested that it might have been a cheeky troll that was up to mischief and caused the mess. We decided that we needed to catch the troll so that this didn’t happen again. In groups, we used different materials to create troll traps. Once we made our trolls traps we decided to use this for the subject of our shared story writing.  Our whole clan worked together to plan and write a story about ‘The Naughty Troll’. We made sure that we followed the correct structure of a story which we had learnt about earlier in the week. We also edited our story as we went along, changing words to make our story more interesting. We wrote a fantastic story together. We have shared it here to let you enjoy it too.

Chefs @ Calderwood

This week Rannoch Clan worked alongside Ness and Tay to begin our new IDL learning.  First of all, we had a feel in Mrs Scobie’s big bag and described what we felt inside it, using interesting adjectives.  Inside the bag were different cooking items and we learnt what we would use them for.

In the next few weeks we are going to learn about food and develop our culinary skills to become cooking champions and the finest chefs in Calderwood.

Our first task was to complete our chef ID cards.  We watched a video and then afterwards reflected on the skills and qualities that a chef might have.  We wrote our names and drew our faces on our own ID cards.  We also wrote our favourite food and our current cooking skills.

We then wrote down 3 things that we would like to achieve and develop through our learning about food. Hopefully over the coming weeks we can get better at cooking and maybe help out at home.

Internet Safety Week

L.I  I am learning how to develop healthy and respectful relationships online.

As it was internet safety week, Rannoch clan learned about how to develop healthy and respectful relationships online.  We discussed in groups, what kindness looks like, feels like and sounds like online, why it matters and what we can do if someone is being hurtful online.

We made a looks like, feels like and sounds like grid to put up in our clan room which included all our ideas.  We can refer back to this when needed.  We then looked at unkind comments and tried to find a way to change these so that they are acceptable to share online.  Finally, we played a game on google called ‘interland’ and explored the kind kingdom level.  This game aims to help children to stay safe and be kind online.  We picked up some helpful hints on how to be kind online.

Climate Change

Rannoch clan have brought their learning about climate change to a close this week.  After learning about deforestation through our reading of The Lorax by Dr Seuss, some of us transformed ourselves into the Lorax to ‘speak for the trees’.  We used our new-found skills in persuasive writing to write a persuasive piece on what we could do as a community to look after the trees.  Fantastic pieces of writing were produced using a clear structure, sensing verbs and persuasive language.

Some pupils have been learning about waste with Miss Redmond and they went for a walk around Calderwood to look at what bins were available for waste and recycling.  Tjhey made a persuasive poster to persuade others to think more carefully about the waste we produce and how we dispose of it.

Some pupils learnt about transport and how this can affect our environment, with Miss Reid.  They completed a traffic survey of Calderwood and created air quality sensors for round the school.

Our final task was to use art to persuade the Calderwood community to look after our planet.  We discussed colour in art and thought about how we might use this in a picture showing our world in all its beauty and showing the world if we do not take action.  I am sure you will agree that everyone produced very powerful pictures, showing great persuasive techniques through art.

All in all, we have had a very interesting and informative look at climate change and have many ideas on what we can do to support our planet moving forward.

Well done to all in Rannoch clan.

Calderwood Tackles Climate Change

Ness, Rannoch and Tay clan have been learning about COP26 together, finding out what it stands for, what it is, why it is happening, and what it means for us and have been learning about climate change with Miss Christie in our STEM lessons.  Through our learning, we wanted to explore climate change even further.

Today, Ness, Rannoch and Tay clan were visited by Miss Connor, our RAISE Primary Science Development Officer in West Lothian, who gave us an introduction to the science behind climate change.

We discussed what the words climate and climate change meant and why climate change is happening.  We then looked more deeply into greenhouse gases that are released into the atmosphere such as carbon dioxide, learning about the links between CO2 and climate change.

Following this discussion, we all carried out an experiment to see if we ‘could see CO2’.   After making predictions of what we might see happening in the experiment, we added sugar to a test tube of warm water and mixed it till the sugar had dissolved.  We then added some yeast to the mixture before, finally, placing a balloon over the top of the test tube.  We waited for approximately 10 minutes to see what might happen.  We found that the balloon inflated, showing that a gas had been created.  This helped us to understand how carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere and trapped, causing the planet to become warmer.   We really enjoyed carrying out the experiment and checking our predictions.

After completing the experiment, we discussed why climate change matters to us and what we can do to help.  We look forward to looking deeper into this in the coming weeks.  Thank you so much to Miss Connor for allowing us to learn and think more about climate change.

#WL_STEM

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