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.
Please see below our rationale for Play-Based learning and teaching in Primary 1.
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 🙂
Ness Clan have been honing their design skills and learning all about the birds around Calderwood in Taylor Wimpey’s bird box competition. Find out more about what we have been up to in our fabulous SWAY here:
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.
As part of our Scottish focus for learning and Burns Day on 25th January the children are participating in a Poetry Recital Competition and have taken home a range of Scottish Poems. The children should choose one poem to learn. The children should learn the poem by heart and use the following success criteria. All children should learn their poem however this is no expectation that they need to recite it in front of the clan if they feel uncomfortable. They also have the option to film their recital, do it to the teacher privately, or as a group. As you will see below, some clans have the same option of poem – this is as these classes are working within the same Curriculum for Excellence level and allows for differentiation. In clan qualifying recitals will take place on Friday 21st January and finals will take place on Friday 28th January (these will be filmed for your viewing).
First Level Success Criteria:
Second Level Success Criteria:
The choice of poems your child can choose from can be found below:
Mull
Orkney
Shetland
Bluebell
Bramble
Ness
Rannoch
P3
P4
The Sair Finger-Walter Wingate
Tay
The Sair Finger-Walter Wingate
Ben Lawers
Ben Lomond
(By Robert Burns)
Ben Lawers had an introductory session with Mrs Benezra a music specialist this week. You can find out more about what they discussed below.
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