Category: Calderwood Communicates
The Ben’s IDL Showcase
Last week, the Ben’s took over the Discovery Den area.
They has been working on their IDL topic ‘Ancient Civilisations’ and had so much amazing work, they wanted to show it off and plan a school event. Here is what they had to say:
In 4 main groups, we chose our Civilisation of interest: Ancient Romans, Ancient Egyptians, the Aztecs and the Vikings.
We organised ourselves into sub-topics and worked for 5 weeks researching, learning, discussing, planning and creating beautiful, amazing pieces of work that demonstrated what we learned from our research.
We set wrote poems and stories, collected data, made PPT’s, cooked food, conducted science experiments, created art pieces, performed drama pieces and made videos.
We used our teamwork skills to work together to build a picture of what we discovered.
They invited members of staff and other clans around and presented beautifully and confidently, the learning and knowledge they had on their chosen topic. Well done Bens!
Calderwood Book Hunt
Due to the fantastic reward of £961.22 from our Book Fair in September, Calderwood Primary has been busy shopping for new books! Our Calderwood pupils have been searching for texts they would like to see in their clan libraries and as part of their guided reading groups. We are very excited that we have the opportunity to add to our selection of books at Calderwood!
We would love for our families to get involved in this too! For Primary 1-3, we are expanding our clan libraries and for P4-P7 we are building our reading group texts. Please use the website links below and type a comment with which texts you would like to see your pupil engaging with at school.
Clan Libraries: https://shop.scholastic.co.uk/childrens-books
Reading Group Books:Â https://shop.scholastic.co.uk/class-sets
Assembly and Narrative Writing in Bramble
Bramble clan have been very busy, preparing for our first Bramble clan assembly at Calderwood. We have all worked together, as a fantastic team, to create our assembly. We all took on different jobs and roles to prepare for this and then brought it all together, to showcase our learning about the Brain, and practised really hard. We had invites to make, props to make, costumes to organise, the script to write, words to practise, displays to make and songs to learn and sing, with actions. We have loved using the stage in the arena and have really enjoyed acting and performing. We have had a fantastic time working on our assembly together and have enjoyed sharing our learning with you all.
We have been exploring traditional tales, fables, myths and legends in our IDL lessons and have learnt what these are and what the main features are. In writing, we delved deeper and looked at the traditional tale of The Little Mermaid. We found that the original story of The Little Mermaid is very different from the one we already know. Together, as a clan, we retold the story using our own words, making sure we used the correct structure – orientation, complication and resolution. Our challenge, was to use this story as a basis for our own. We could use the story and change the characters or setting to make it different from the original. Instead of the Little Mermaid, some of us changed the character to an Arctic Fox, a curious turtle or a dragon. We kept some parts of the story the same and changed others. We created 24 different stories from the one tale!
We worked hard on our stories, focussing on a different section each week. We wrote each section and then re-read it, and edited parts of it. We enjoyed editing our stories- scoring out parts or adding in parts, showing- and feeling what it is like to be an author.
In IDL lessons, we learnt more about the book-making process and researched the different roles involved in this process. We found out that there are many different roles involved in the process such as the author, illustrator, designer, editor and publisher. After researching this we moved on to making our own books. We took the story we had been creating in our writing lessons and designed what we would like our book of this to be like and what materials we would like to use to make it.
We have been busy creating our own books to include our own creative story that we have been writing. It was very exciting to transform our work from a piece of writing in our jotter to our own book that we can read to others. We are super proud of our work.#
Blogging Friday in Bluebell
In Bluebell clan we have been working very hard on developing our narrative writing. We changed our shared writing on ‘Cinderella’ and created our very own. Pupils in Bluebell clan used their imagination to develop their characters, theme and setting. We discussed the importance of using adjectives to describe our narrative writing and learned how to use speech marks correctly throughout. We are continuing to self and peer assess our work using our genre and core targets. We used our self and peer assessments to support us to edit our writing. We focused on ‘up levelling’ some of our work by adding more descriptive language. We have developed our ‘Phenomenal wall of words’ which supported us to do this.
In addition to this, we have been excellent authors and illustrators as we manufactured our very own book! We looked at different methods of book binding, chose our materials and planned our writing before making them independently. We loved the opportunity to share this with our parents on Book Week Scotland and are looking forward to share our finished products!
We have enjoyed narrative writing that much that we have chosen to focus our next weeks assembly on our literacy! We have planned this production together and shared out the roles and responsibilities. This involved an invitation committee, a power point team, backdrops and props teams, VCOP team, choreographers for our dancing and our tech and equipment team. We also participated in drama where we learnt about freeze frames and have incorporated this within our assembly. We have been practising lots and cannot wait to share our learning with you all next week!
Book Week Scotland at Calderwood
Please take a look at our literacy learning that took place during Book Week Scotland. We shared our passion, excitement and creativity for reading!
Capturing Calderwood: Book Week Scotland
Capturing Calderwood: Book Week Scotland
Dear parent/ carer,
We would love some feedback on our Book Week Scotland Events, please take a minute to complete the form below.
Have a lovely weekend,
Miss Burton
Get Online Week 2022
The Ben’s Book Covers
The Ben’s have been inspired by their favourite books to create book covers that are now displayed in the discovery den. They have been creative with their work, some using free hand painting and colouring, others tracing, and some clan members used technology to design their covers. They have used their own ideas of what it means to be successful as a means to set a standard at this task, all students have completed it above and beyond these expectations. At home, you could discuss what your favourite book is and why you have chosen this – you could even have another read of that book to remember why you love it so much.
