Category: Calderwood Curriculum

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.

Oceans IDL

At Calderwood, our pupils get autonomy over what they want to learn. We try to ensure we listen and follow along with what they find interesting.

Through  This Mural (click to see what we said at our last pupil planning meeting)

We decided we would learn about Oceans. Through our planning meeting, we looked at different sub-topics and thought about what we already knew and what we wanted to find out more about:

 

 

This week, we looked at where the worlds ocean were and used Google Earth to locate, name and label different Ocean Areas and seas. Mural allows us to work collaboratively on the same document. We used technology, map skills and research skills to complete our geography challenge.

We also found out that the river closest to Calderwood is the River Almond and it runs into the North Atlantic Ocean.

 

 

We think we did a great job at our first attempt – what do you think? Spot any mistakes?

 

We are looking forward to exploring more about ore world’s ocean as we move forward through the term.

FAO Parent of Primary 5 pupils – Bramble & Thistle Clans

Your child has been recently involved with a music initiative called ‘Artistic Rhythms’ with Limelight Music. They have been learning and creating music inspired by world artworks from 3 countries in 3 continents – Tanzania, Brazil and Scotland. These countries have been chosen for their rich cultural heritage, which often brings the art forms of dance, music, poetry, rhythm and visual art together.

The block of learning is due to come to an end and the last session will be held on Tuesday 7th February. While I appreciate the short notice and other opportunities to visit school that week are already in place, Limelight would like to invite you in to share what your children have been learning. We will record the final sessions for any parents unable to attend and this will be shared at our ‘Caledonian Clan Celebration’ event.

There are two sessions, your child will know whether they participate in the first group before break or the second group after break.

Session 1 – 10.00 – 10.25
Session 2 – 11.15 – 11.45

We look forward to sharing this amazing learning and welcome you to join in if you wish.

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!

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