Category: Calderwood Communicates

From Bear Island to the Stage: Tummel Clan’s Adventures in Storytelling and Performance

This week, Tummel clan finished reading The Last Bear by Hannah Gold. The Last Bear follows 11-year-old April Wood on a journey to Bear Island, where she discovers a stranded polar bear affected by climate change. Despite being told no bears remain, April befriends and helps him, embarking on a courageous mission to return him home. The story taught us the importance of protecting our planet, showing kindness, and remembering that young people can make a difference!

As we approached the novel’s conclusion, we planned and performed a short drama to depict April and Bear’s final journey to Svalbard. Our performance focused on key narrative elements—orientation, complication, and resolution—which later guided us in writing our own narrative scripts based on the drama.

Our Tummel Primary 5s had an amazing time at the pantomime watching Cinderella! The excitement reached new heights when one of our lucky clan mates was invited on stage with the mischievous Fairy May. After weeks of hard work crafting our own narrative scripts, it was truly inspiring to experience a live performance. We all agreed—it was a fantastic show!

Book Week Scotland in Schiehallion

Schiehallion have had a really fun week doing lots of different activities linked to Book Week Scotland. We started the week by designing new covers for our favourite books. Some of the clan chose to create a new cover for our class novel ‘The Last Bear’ – while others chose their own books.

We also took part in a number of quizzes as well. The clan had a lovely time guessing the ‘Staff Shelfies’ where they played detective to try and work out which book shelf belonged to each member of staff. They also took part in a book quiz organised by Mrs Rodford from Primary 6.

The clan then had a surprise visit from Miss Melrose on Thursday, who came to do some reading with the clan while Mr Allan went down to read to Bluebell.

Schiehallion had a lovely week, and are looking forward to continuing our reading over the coming weeks.

Book Week in Tay Clan

Tay clan have had a great week celebrating Book Week Scotland!

We worked collaboratively to make a book cover of our clan novel – The Land of Roar.  Some clan members drew the cover of the book and the rest of the clan drew small pictures of characters or scenes from the book that we attached around the cover.  We were very proud of our teamwork.

We completed a book quiz and we think we got all the answers correct, Some of us swapped books with each other and were excited to have a new book to read at home and we enjoyed guessing the champions book shelf in the book ‘shelfie’ quiz.  We got Mrs Scobie, Miss Burton and Mrs Findlay’s book shelves straight away!

We enjoyed a visit from Mrs Findlay who read us the beginning of ‘Rivet Boy’ which we loved so much that we want to read more at another time.

Finally, we dressed up as our favourite book characters.  We had some characters from Harry Potter, Gangsta Granny and even some mythical creatures – I wonder if you can spot a very well-known green monster hiding in our pictures.

We have had a great week, enjoying lots of books and stories and these have helped us to gather new and interesting words that we can use when writing our own stories.

 

Book Week Scotland in Baird

This week, Baird have enjoyed a range of reading and writing activities to celebrate Book Week Scotland. We were given the opportunity to deliver the book bags to the Primary 3 clans and read their books together. Both Baird and P3 loved this experience! We have also created some new front covers for books we have been reading, completed a Book Week Quiz and created fact files for characters from our novels.

In writing, we have been focused on creating narrative texts. This week, we became authors as we looked at creating a sci-fi story. Before writing, we revised the different features of a narrative. We used a diamond 9 diagram to identify the importance of each feature from most important to least. We then reflected on our previous stories and chose a feature to focus on this week. 

We began planning for our writing by creating our own planets to visit. We drew these in our jotter and labelled our planets with any key information we wanted to add. We then filled out our plans, wrote our stories and shared them with our peers, who then gave us some feedback before we edited and self assessed.       

Book Week Scotland at Calderwood 2024

Book Week Scotland  – see poster for details of what is happening this week.

Book Week Scotland at Calderwood PS

 

Book Week Scotland (18th -24th Nov) is a national celebration of books and reading. During this week pupils in P1-P3 will be gifted a ‘Book Bag’ in school.  Gifting the bags during Book Week Scotland will draw pupils’ and parents’ attention to this national celebration and encourage everyone to participate in the week’s events, laying the groundwork for further engagement in reading.

In school, Book Week Scotland can provide a platform for lots of activities celebrating books.

Details of how to use the Book Bags at home can be found below.

Bookbug P1 Bag Parent letter 2024

RWC P2 Parent letter 2024

RWC P3 Parent letter 2024

 

Tay Clan – Sharing the Learning

Tay clan were very proud to share their literacy learning with families this week.  We were very excited to demonstrate what and how we have been learning in our writing lessons and the progress we have made in our writing.  It was a lovely afternoon.  Thank you to everyone who attended.

We also enjoyed listening to our new class novel ‘The Land of Roar’ which hooked us into our new literacy theme for this terms learning.  We got comfy and relaxed on the carpet with pillows and sat ‘ by the fire’ (YouTube works wonders these days!) to listen to an imaginative story.  Afterwards, we took inspiration from the story and created maps of our own imaginary worlds.  We loved delving into our imagination, where anything is possible!

Spooky Schiehallion

This week in Schiehallion we’ve been writing Halloween poems. Our aim was to write riddle poems using six clues to describe a Halloween object. The reader would then have to guess what they think the poem is about.

We used our descriptive language skills that we developed last term to help write our clues. I think you’ll agree that the clan did a great job, and that the poems are a very enjoyable read.

Leven: Description Writing

In Leven clan, we began our learning about description texts by creating our own sea creatures using line, shape and colour. We then wrote a description explaining our creature to our peers. We tried to use interesting adjectives in order to bring our sea characters to life and make the description exciting for the reader.

This week, we have continued to develop our descriptive writing skills by using the ‘describing bubble’. We used the well known character of Mr Tickle as our stimulus and used as many adjectives and descriptive phrases as we could to describe him.

We then learned about the purpose and structure of a description text, developing our understanding further of each section.

Finally, we wrote our own description text about Mr Tickle, using the skills and knowledge that we have developed.

 

 

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