Category: Creative Calderwood

Ben Lomond’s Christmas Festivities

The Bens have been incredibly busy with our festive celebrations!

We spent the afternoon making Christmas crafts for our friends and family: we made woolly hats, cards, jewellery, coasters and tiles.

We made our own ‘Aztec’ hot chocolate as part of our IDL topic on Ancient Civilisations. It was pure 100% dark chocolate powder with no sugar or milk. Most of us thought it was ‘bitter’, ‘disgusting’ and ‘terrible’, however a few people thought it was ‘amazing!’

 

 

We also celebrated our Christmas lunch together – the food was yummy and we were also amazing helpers – helping to serve the younger pupils!

 

We also enjoyed our Christmas party for which we planned the games, activities and playlist! We had a best dancer competition, best singer competition, hula hoop pass-the-parcel, corners, musical chairs and of course… party food!!

 

 

Our Christmas Around the World play was also one on Ben Lomond’s highlights! We chose the topic, wrote the script, designed the set, costumes and chose our song. It was directed and lead by the pupils and was a huge success – check out our vid here! https://sway.office.com/gm4BEjrfvmuvnQBw?ref=Link

 

It’s been an incredible year and we thank you for all your continued support.

 

Next term will be VERY exciting as we begin to think about leaving our Calderwood P7 Legacy behind.

 

For now, relax & enjoy the break!

 

Ben Lomond & Mrs McGarvey 🙂

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.#

 

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.

P2 and P3 Clans Interdisciplinary Learning: Calderwood Careers

We are so excited to launch the P2 and P3 interdisciplinary learning context called Calderwood Careers. In this context, we will be learning about the world of work and the different jobs in our society. We will be exploring 3 different types of jobs:

  1. Calderwood Constructors: builders and architects
  2. Calderwood Cooks: chefs and bakers
  3. Calderwood Consultants: doctors, nurses, pharmacy and other health care professions.
  • We are looking for some support and help with our learning from our Calderwood community. We are hoping to build our play areas across our clans to reflect these different jobs, and therefore if anyone has any toys, dressing up, equipment or learning materials can you please drop these in to our school office. We would really appreciate it!
  • We are also looking for any volunteers who specialise in the jobs above to come in to our school and speak about your job role. Please fill out the form if you can help us!

We have asked all pupils in the P2 and P3 clans to bring in a 500ml plastic bottle for Monday 12th September to use in their Calderwood Consultants theme.

Thank you for supporting our school again!

The P2 and P3 clans!

Bug Hotel – We need your help!

As part of Primary 1’s ‘Calderwood Creatures’ context for learning. They plan to make a Bug Hotel with the children. We are looking for donations of any resources from our lovely Calderwood community. If you can help please let us know!

  • Bricks
  • Bamboo canes
  • Tiles
  • Stones/Pebbles
  • Bark
  • Plastic Bottles
  • Cardboard

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Creative Calderwood – STEM

Today we were delighted to host the Primary Science Development Officers from authorities across Scotland. They were all given a tour of our school building and heard all about the amazing STEM learning which is going on every day at Calderwood Primary School!

Click here to see the Sway for yourself and catch up on the highlights from a Year of STEM at Calderwood.

Play in Primary 1 our Rationale

Please see below our rationale for Play-Based learning and teaching in Primary 1.

Play in Primary 1 at Calderwood

Term 4 in the Bens

Last term, to begin our celebration of British Science Week 2022, the Ben Clans created a STEM takeover for each Clan in our school! The groups created a variety of lessons to deliver to the younger clans. Tay Clan learned about the skeleton, Rannoch Clan learned all about space and our solar system, Ness created scrap robots and used a sphero to move the robot, Bluebell Clan looked at the layers of the Earth and Bramble focussed on food chains in our oceans. Mull, Shetland and Orkney developed an understanding of space, star constellations and the universe.

The experience generated a lot of discussion around earth, space and the universe,  informing the direction of learning for this term.

Our cross curricular topic this term is science based and will be looking at the origins of life and the habitability of earth and other planets. We began this week by watching a short clip narrated by David Attenborough about the tree of life and then researched the evolution of a penguin, inputting our research onto Padlet. Please click here to see our research.

Alongside this, we will also began understanding the different viewpoints offered in the creation stories from different world religions. We started this week with the Christian creation story and began to understand that there are similarities with that and the creation story in Judaism. We created our own versions of the Judeo-Christian creation story using powerpoint, imovies including greenscreen and SWAY.

 

Literacy

We are beginning to learn about the features and structure of narrative writing. We have been exploring our reading books to develop our understanding of the orientation, complication and resolution found within this genre of text. This week, we had a go at writing a narrative based around a theme of racing. We looked at a good example and deconstructed it so we could understand how to write one ourselves. One of the Bens wrote a story called ‘The Horse Race’. It is a good example as it has a clear orientation stating who, when and where; the complication is clear and includes direct speech and accurate punctuation and the resolution explains what happens and solves the problem, bringing the story to a conclusion.

We are excited about the term ahead and look forward to sharing with you soon. Watch this space!!

The Bens 🙂

 

 

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