Category: Calderwood Curriculum

Calderwood Choir

Our Calderwood Choir have had a fantastic year so far, performing at various events.  They performed at various Christmas events such as the Nativity, Christmas Craft Fair and the switch on of the Calderwood Christmas lights.  In Term 3, we performed a set of Scottish songs for the poetry recital and for our Calderwood Connects.  The choir’s performance of ‘Caledonia’ was just beautiful and some emotional tears were shed from some audience members who were so moved by the rendition of this song.

The children have been requesting songs to sing at rehearsals and have enjoyed having a go at their favourites.  The choir have now decided on the songs they wish to learn and perform and we will be working on these throughout the rest of Term 4, getting them performance ready for end of term events.

The choir continue to display commitment, dedication and motivation during rehearsals and performances and have developed their confidence to sing in front of our community.  The children give it their all and the joy in singing is palpable.

We can’t wait to perform for you again this term.

In the meantime, have a look on twitter to hear some snippets of our performances.

 

Calderwood Basketball

What a year it has been for our very first Basketball Teams. We have been lucky enough to have not just ONE but TWO teams competing this year – KNICKS & LAKERS

Mrs Morrison and Mrs Robertson have been so proud of how every team member has developed throughout this past year. We have demonstrated fantastic teamwork and an abundance of core basketball skills. Through participating in our conferences at WCHS and Armadale Academy, we have also been able to demonstrate excellent sportsmanship, resilience and utter determination.

Our Knicks have one final conference to attend and will hopefully progress onto the silver playoff weeks – GO KNICKS!

Thank you to all parents who have come along to support us over these past few months!

Championing Coding: National Robotarium

The Bens had a phenomenal opportunity to take a trip to the newly-opened National Robotarium. Ben Lomond and Ben Lawers had the most amazing day being ambassadors for our school, showing off their robotics and coding knowledge, and exploring new AI technologies.

Please see the Sway created by Ben Lomond all about their trip:

Go to this Sway

Community Cupboard Donations

We have recently started up our ‘Community Cupboard’ at Calderwood to support our families and community. As part of this, we have been growing our partnerships to help support and build our community cupboard stock.

We are now open to receive donations for our school. We are interested in collecting dried foods, non-perishable goods and any toiletries.

If you are able, please send these items in with your child for our dress down day. We are looking for an item per family NOT per child.

If you feel you could benefit from our community cupboard, please contact the office and ask for one of the ‘Equity Champs’ to get in touch. There is also a discrete online form you can complete and someone will get in touch with you.

Rights Respecting School Award: Calderwood Achieve Bronze!

This year as part of our school improvement plan we have been working towards the Rights Respecting School Award. Before the Easter Holidays we achieved our Bronze Award!

What is a Rights Respecting School? 

The Rights Respecting School promotes the UN convention on the rights of the child. This is an integral part of Calderwood’s ethos and vision statement. RRS supports children in becoming global citizens and supports our belief that children achieve most when they feel included and valued.

We want children at Calderwood to learn about their rights and feel empowered about their education. We recognise that rights and responsibilities are equally balanced and encourage our children to take responsibility for their actions in order to develop an awareness of how they might affect the rights of others. The aim is to help children achieve their potential and become responsible citizens.

What are the key principles of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child?

 The UN convention consists of 54 articles in total, with each article referring to a right. UNICEF uses the UNCRC as a framework for its work for all the world’s children and has developed the Rights Respecting School Award (RRSA).

At Calderwood the children are learning many of the rights through their involvement with UNICEF and a Rights Respecting ethos, throughout the whole school.

The main rights they are learning are:

The right to an education;

The right to a home;

The right to know their rights;

The right to play;

The right to nutritious food;

The right to clean water;

What can parents and carers do to help their children?

Talk to your children about what rights they have.

Show your children how they can promote these rights at home.

Remind your children about the differences between wants and needs.

Allow your children to take on small responsibilities at home.

Watch the news with your children and talk about issues they may have seen or heard where the rights of others may have been violated.

Use the language of rights and responsibilities and discuss how you can promote these values at home.

Bramble Clan -Term 3

Multiplication circles

We all had a think about our learning in numeracy and felt that we needed to work on our times tables a bit more as knowing these will help us in many other areas of Numeracy and Maths.  We made a times tables booklet which includes all our times tables from 2-12.  We worked on a challenge, called multiplication circles, to find patterns in our times tables.  We connected numbers from each of the times table, creating a shape/pattern in the circle such as pentagons and stars.  We also could see that some of the times tables created the same shape/pattern so this helped us to understand relationships between different times tables.  Primary 5 learnt this 1st and then taught the primary 4’s how to do this task.  We were fascinated at the results.

Planting

We have been learning about how seeds become plants and wanted to have a go at this ourselves.  This week we were able to go outside and plant a variety of seeds with Bluebell and Thistle.  We all planted our seeds in a pot and have placed them in our school garden.  We hope that over the Easter holidays these will grow.  Our nursery children are going to help to water them while we are not in school.  We enjoyed learning about planting and how a seed grows and have lots of questions about which we will explore in the new term.

Engineering

We have been learning about the engineering process through IDL lessons.  We discussed different inventions and how they have affected our lives.  We also looked at the history of different Scottish inventions and what problems these solved.  This then led us on to thinking about what we might invent ourselves.  We thought about a problem locally, internationally or globally and came up with a solution to solve the problem by creating our own invention.  We drew a labelled diagram of our invention and wrote a persuasive letter to an engineer, asking them to invent it, giving reasons why this should be invented.  We loved being creative and designing our own inventions.  Look in our class notebooks in TEAMS to find out what we designed.

Reading – Note-taking

We have been learning to take notes on a text.  We have been recording key words and phrases from different texts into different note-taking formats – some of us like to use mind maps and some like to put our notes into sections.  Some of us also like to add pictures to our notes.  This helps us to remember all the information.

Through note-taking we have been taking notes on different processes such as how an earthquake happens, how sound travels and how a seed becomes a plant.  We have found these topics very interesting and have built our vocabulary and knowledge through our note-taking lessons.

We have also used these notes to help plan and write explanation texts in writing.  We have really enjoyed learning about the different processes and writing about them.

School trip

There was a buzz of excitement around the P4/5 corridor as we went on our 1st Calderwood School trip to the Glasgow Science Centre.  We watched a movie about a space station in the I-Max cinema.  We loved wearing our 3D glasses and were trying to touch all the images.  It was fascinating!  We also loved all the hands-on activities to touch and explore, especially the wonky house!   A ggreat time was had by all.

We have had yet another busy and exciting term!  Well done Bramble Clan.

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