Cost of Living – Calderwood Cares

We are looking at ways to support our parents during the ‘Cost of Living Crisis’.

At Calderwood, there are a number of ways we would like to support our families during this difficult time. One of which would be to start a food pantry and we are looking to gauge interest. Our plan would be to issue a weekly order form for items that you may need urgently. This service would be strictly anonymous and we can arrange delivery or pick up on a Friday.

We would also like to know how we can support parents by inviting in or running sessions with agencies such as ‘The West Lothian Advice Shop’. They can offer free and impartial advice for those experiencing financial hardship and can signpost to different agencies to support families in all matters.

If this is something you feel you would benefit from, please answer this short survey so we can begin to source items and arrange dates with the West Lothian Advice Shop.

https://forms.office.com/e/cwjhZKF7EC

FAO Parent of Primary 5 pupils – Bramble & Thistle Clans

Your child has been recently involved with a music initiative called ‘Artistic Rhythms’ with Limelight Music. They have been learning and creating music inspired by world artworks from 3 countries in 3 continents – Tanzania, Brazil and Scotland. These countries have been chosen for their rich cultural heritage, which often brings the art forms of dance, music, poetry, rhythm and visual art together.

The block of learning is due to come to an end and the last session will be held on Tuesday 7th February. While I appreciate the short notice and other opportunities to visit school that week are already in place, Limelight would like to invite you in to share what your children have been learning. We will record the final sessions for any parents unable to attend and this will be shared at our ‘Caledonian Clan Celebration’ event.

There are two sessions, your child will know whether they participate in the first group before break or the second group after break.

Session 1 – 10.00 – 10.25
Session 2 – 11.15 – 11.45

We look forward to sharing this amazing learning and welcome you to join in if you wish.

Cosy Corner Club – Upper Challenge 1

A group of our upper school pupils were tasked with a challenge to fully research what activities are available for kids in Livingston. They had to work in a small group to find total costs, bus times and costs before voting on the best place to go. They invited Miss Burton to listen to their ideas and pitched their proposition. All of the children were able to convince Miss Burton that a visit to our local cinema via local transport and to visit Hot Flame was the best option. The pupils created their own itinerary using the information they had gathered, were involved in the risk assessment and one of our pupils was responsible for booking of the trip by phone.

This group are now our ‘Upper Skills’ ambassadors and some are looking forward to leading the next challenge… Ready, Steady, Cook 👨‍🍳

Cost of Living Crisis

Energy Prices skyrocketing!

Food and petrol prices rising!

Taxes and wages stagnating!

Rent prices are on the rise!

Heating or eating?

Nobody should have to make that a choice!

If you are experiencing financial difficulties due to the ‘Cost of Living Crisis’, please know that at Calderwood Primary School, we are here to help signpost you to the services available.

West Lothian Council’s Anti-Poverty service has devised some resources to support families online, if you need to make use of the school WIFI or devices to do so, get in touch and arrangements will be made to support this.

Community Food Outlets: www.westlothian.gov.uk/access-to-food

Advice Shop Services: www.westlothian.gov.uk/adviceshop

Practical Help:  www.westlothian.gov.uk/costofliving

Practical help and support through the development of self-help booklets, which will be held in a central location to allow support to be accessed easily and quickly, a dedicated information hub has been created to hold all cost of living support information.

Welcome Warm Places: www.westlothian.gov.uk/warm-welcome

Welcoming warm places across West Lothian which can provide a warm space for people to rest in addition to acting as a hub where they can access advice and support in relation to the cost of living (also includes information about community food providers).

Please contact us if you are worried about anything, we understand that Christmas can be a particularly difficult time for families. If you are worried or have any questions about how the school can help, call in at the office and ask to speak to someone from the Equity Team and we will get back in touch.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

World Book Day – Quick & Easy Dress Up Ideas

The best costumes don’t have to cost a fortune! Look for inspiration in dress up boxes or get creative with some bits n bobs from around the house. There are lots of characters from stories that are everyday children in normal clothes. Add a simple prop and that would be enough to suggest who they have decided to dress up as. Why not try to create the book or add a few cut out, painted shapes to an old t shirt.

 

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Categorized as Calderwood

Winter Clothing Donations

 

Sustainability Station

At Calderwood we want to do our bit to help our planet. We are setting up our uniform and winter clothing SWAP SHOP which will be located at the front door of the school next to the school office.

Parents can swap good quality school uniform and winter clothes or just take what they need.

There will be a selection of uniform in different sizes, winter jackets and wellies.

If your child has grown out of last years winter wardrobe and you wish to DONATE good quality:

WINTER JACKETS, WATERPROOFS, FOOTWARE or UNIFORM

Please drop it into the green buggy also located at the front door. 

 

 

Thank you!

 

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Categorized as Calderwood

Collectively Calderwood


We are looking for some items to make our current classroom ‘Schiehallion’ feel more homely as an extension to our Hawthorn Hut.

We are trying to be as environmentally friendly and sustainable as possible so thought we would reach out to our community first and see what we can gather.

Items that we are looking for should be of a good quality and  games or puzzles must contain all pieces.

If you have any of the furniture or larger items that we are looking for, please contact the office on wlcalderwood-ps@westlothian.org.uk or 01506 280060 and we will arrange collection.

Thank you 😊

 

Rugs different shapes and sizes, textures

Cushions/beanbags/oversized soft toys

Bookcase/shelves

Large Kallax (ikea) style unit or box shelve storage unit

Storage boxes

Side table lamps

Throws/blankets

Fitness trampoline, stretch yoga bands, muscle rollers, yoga mats

Blender for making soup/smoothies

Egg chairs with canopy (ikea)

Baby dolls and accessories

Role play – house stuff (kitchen + accessories), dress up material (not costumes), sturdy full length mirror/handheld mirrors, beads, bangles, hats, scarves

Old games consol & games (Minecraft, Sims etc)

Scooters – scuttle bugs/ balance bikes/ swingball (indoor)

Old working toys

Train/ cars trucks and tracks

Figures, Barbie’s, LOL dolls, action figures, dinosaurs, animals farm/zoo,

Table top games

Construction sets – Lego, duplo, k’nex, magnet, marbles

Puzzle/coloring books

Play dough sets/tools

Jigsaw puzzles

Gardening equipment

First Week Back – Bluebell

We have been very busy in the Bluebell Clan getting to know each other and our Champion. We started the new term learning more about one another, discussing our summer adventures and participating in various ‘Getting to know you’ activities.

 

We showed Miss Ali how much we love arts and crafts by drawing our very own self-portraits. We drew illustrations of our summer adventures into our sunglasses and designed an ‘All about me’ t-shirt which shared our hobbies, favourite colour, favourite animals and likes and dislikes. This has been made into ‘Our Clan is our family’ display, inspired by a lovely book we read called ‘Our Class is our Family’.

After reading this book, we discussed how we are all connected and how we must make everyone feel welcome. We also discussed our role and responsibility within our clan rooms and came up with the following roles: milk monitors, cloakroom monitors, line leader, door holder, technology monitors and henry hoovers.

We came up with a minion themed recognition board and have been working very hard to get our minions onto the banana by meeting our Clan targets! We have been discussing noise levels in our Clan room as well as our relentless routines for indoor breaks/lunch, gym hall and our conga. We discussed how this should look, feel and sound like. We also created great teacher adverts and discussed what our clan members should look, feel and sound like. We have been learning about our rights and how this looks within our Clan room. From interesting discussion, we came up with our Seven rules for our Clan charter.

These are our rules:

1. Always be kind and friendly to each other.

2. Respect everyone and look after our clan property.

3. Play and learn safely.

4. Make everyone feel included in play and learning.

5. Respect everyone’s differences such as views and opinions.

6. Work towards our clan targets, individual targets, and achievements.

7. Learn from your mistakes!

In addition to all our hard work, we attended our very first Calderwood Connects for this term. We were very pleased that Mrs Grieve complimented us on how good our sitting and listening was during this assembly. As a reward, we played ‘Splat’ the following day and had lots of fun teaching Miss Ali how to play it!

This week we have also been doing a lot of team building activities such as creating our shields and designing our Clan flag. We also came up with our table group names and have designed our pupil charter. Our Clan voted for the ‘Bluebell theme’ and have had lots of fun creating our own Bluebells.

With Mrs Robertson we participated in the ‘Paperchain Challenge’ where we continued to work hard to develop our teamwork and problem solving skills. Our challenge involved creating the longest paperchain! We were able to identify the skills required to work effectively in a team and demonstrated this superbly. Teams were randomly generated and we enjoyed experiencing the skills and qualities of different classmates.  We are starting to introduce specific roles within teams that can help to promote positive teamwork and a range or skills development e.g. leadership, time keeping and organisation.

Once our challenge time was up, we had to consider the best way of working out the longest chain.  This learning experience took us outdoors to investigate the range of materials that could support our measuring.  Can you guess the longest paperchain…? 9m – well done to the winning team!

 

What other challenges will we face this year in Bluebell?

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Thistle – Back to school

We are BACK!!

We have spent the last few week settling back in to our new clan with our new champions and clan members. To start off we had the task of designing our own learning space. We wanted a quiet space and lots of flexible seating, an art area, a construction area and space to go and work outwith the clan. We have enjoyed reconnecting with each other during our ‘stag start’ in the morning, playing games, being creative and building with lego. Some of us even experimented with robotics and creating circuits with some engineering sets.

We reflected on last years learning and discussed what we’d like to learn over the course of the year. One of the things we all decided that we wanted to carry over was our ‘Recognition Board’. We voted that it should have a dinosaur theme. Everyone created their own dinosaur themed character for our wall display and we have been using it this week. Lots of people were recognised for ‘listening respectfully to each other and waiting our turn to speak’.

We are looking forward to our year in Thistle and have lots of exciting opportunities coming our way.

 

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Categorized as Calderwood

The Bens @ Camp

What a way to end the term! This week we were lucky enough to get out to Lowport at Xcite Linlithgow to spend the day splashing about on the canal in canoes and working through some challenges as a team.

We all thoroughly enjoyed canoeing 🛶 on the canal. It took us a bit of time to figure out how to move the boats effectively but eventually managed forwards and backwards to play some fun games. We had fun, we laughed and got soaked.

      

The first challenge being about listening to each others ideas and coming up with solutions to quite a simple challenge, pass the ball to each other without dropping it. This was much more challenging that initially thought. After some time, some great (some not so great) suggestions, the team worked out that concentration, communication and listening to each other was absolutely key.    

Next the challenge, called ‘Bang Grid’, tested memory, perseverance and communication. We started out the challenge on a grid of unmarked squares. After  standing on the square the group discovered whether it was a safe square or BANG square. If we stepped on the bang square we had to return to the beginning. Eventually we all worked together to direct each team member across.

 

   

 

Another challenge was to get all the water in the tub. However, a series of obstacles and challenges were set and the groups worked hard using the communication skills they had learned to be successful. Some clear leaders shone through and it was very apparent that our practice of STEM in school helped in the engineering part of the challenge.

 

Lastly, how to communicate without talking. Some amazing gestures and strategies to arrange ourselves along a bench without falling off. We had to arrange ourselves in order of height, month of birth and an animal of choice.

 

Overall a cracking few days where memories have been made!

 

                             

Even our champions had fun!

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