Category: Creative Calderwood

Calderwood Tackles Climate Change

Ness, Rannoch and Tay clan have been learning about COP26 together, finding out what it stands for, what it is, why it is happening, and what it means for us and have been learning about climate change with Miss Christie in our STEM lessons.  Through our learning, we wanted to explore climate change even further.

Today, Ness, Rannoch and Tay clan were visited by Miss Connor, our RAISE Primary Science Development Officer in West Lothian, who gave us an introduction to the science behind climate change.

We discussed what the words climate and climate change meant and why climate change is happening.  We then looked more deeply into greenhouse gases that are released into the atmosphere such as carbon dioxide, learning about the links between CO2 and climate change.

Following this discussion, we all carried out an experiment to see if we ‘could see CO2’.   After making predictions of what we might see happening in the experiment, we added sugar to a test tube of warm water and mixed it till the sugar had dissolved.  We then added some yeast to the mixture before, finally, placing a balloon over the top of the test tube.  We waited for approximately 10 minutes to see what might happen.  We found that the balloon inflated, showing that a gas had been created.  This helped us to understand how carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere and trapped, causing the planet to become warmer.   We really enjoyed carrying out the experiment and checking our predictions.

After completing the experiment, we discussed why climate change matters to us and what we can do to help.  We look forward to looking deeper into this in the coming weeks.  Thank you so much to Miss Connor for allowing us to learn and think more about climate change.

#WL_STEM

Invisible String Adventure

Learning Intention: I can use adjectives to describe a setting.

This week as part of our Invisible string topic, Bluebell clan choose a destination they would most love to visit. With a partner, we researched our chosen destination on the netbooks looking at real life photographs.

Within our Calderwood Communicates lesson, we identified what an adjective is and used lots of different adjectives to describe what we might see and hear at our destination. Bluebell Clan thought of lots of amazing adjectives such as:

  • Deep blue sea
  • Crunchy leaves
  • Birds twitting
  • Splashing waterfall

We then wrote a postcard to someone we are connected to and including adjectives to describe our destination.

Hope you have a lovely September break and looking forward to seeing you all on Wednesday in our new Calderwood school.

Musings from Mull 3/9/21

It has been another busy few weeks in Mull Clan.  We have gotten to grips with our day to day routines and have demonstrated a confident attitude within our school environment.

Our big focus this week was an introduction to our initial sounds through the Letterland characters.  Pupils have a fast track introduction to all the letters characters, their sounds and actions before we look at each sound in more detail after the September break.  Have you heard of Harry Hat Man or Annie Apple yet? Ask your children to tell you all about them and the sound that they make.

We have also been continuing to practice our number recognition and counting skills.  We have used smartboard games, playdoh and monster numbers to help us with a multi-sensory learning.  We are going to be building on our subitizing skills with using dot patterns for quick identification of a number of items in a set.  A set of dominoes are great for this if you want to practise at home.

We continued to engage with our whole school project of ‘Invisible Strings.’  All pupils made a special gift for an important person they have an invisible string connection to, we hope you liked them.  We have also been summarising some of our favourite parts of the book; making connections to our own interests and experiences.  We also looked at some of the interesting vocabulary with the text and discussed this in more detail.

Mull Clan have also started to explore Rights Respecting School and the UNCRC whilst building our class charter.  Our class charter will be our agreed class rules.  Our pupils came up with some really thoughtful suggestions for how they would like our classroom to: feel like, sound like and look like.  We will continue to reflect on and review our class charter once we move to our new home at Calderwood.

 

Please keep on checking your individual Seesaw accounts for day to day learning.

Mrs Robertson

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