Leven, Linlithgow, Rannoch, Tay and Tummel Clans have their Clan Calderwood Connects this term, that families are invited to. These have a Scottish theme. Due to this, families might want to choose to attend one or the other of these events, or attend both.
Due to the fantastic reward of £961.22 from our Book Fair in September, Calderwood Primary has been busy shopping for new books! Our Calderwood pupils have been searching for texts they would like to see in their clan libraries and as part of their guided reading groups. We are very excited that we have the opportunity to add to our selection of books at Calderwood!
We would love for our families to get involved in this too! For Primary 1-3, we are expanding our clan libraries and for P4-P7 we are building our reading group texts. Please use the website links below and type a comment with which texts you would like to see your pupil engaging with at school.
Clan Libraries: https://shop.scholastic.co.uk/childrens-books
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 🙂
Calderwood Primary School took part in the Sustrans Christmas Challenge, ‘Leg it to Lapland’. This challenge encouraged all pupils to take their journeys to and from school by foot, scooter or bicycle. The charity launched this challenge to help reduce traffic congestion and air pollution around the school. Each day pupils travelled to school during the challenge week they earned ‘one virtual mile’ towards Lapland. Completing 30 mins of other exercise i.e. dancing, scoring goals at football practice or learning some new moves at Taekwondo practice also earned them a virtual mile! Completing other active journeys e.g. walking to football practice also earned them a virtual mile! The school who get the highest number of average miles per pupil will be the winner!
We were very lucky to have Santa and his elves deliver a special prize to a pupil in each clan who had gone over and above during the Leg it to Lapland Challenge week! Well done to all of our pupils!
In Ben Lomond, we have been taking part in ‘rich thinking tasks’.
Researched & developed by Peter Liljedahl, in his book ‘Building Thinking Classrooms, ‘Rich Tasks’ are what help us develop thinking, focus, collaboration and problem solving skills.
We have been asking our own questions and working together to answer them. Click on our working Mural to see what we have been investigating: https://app.mural.co/t/p5674878/m/p5674878/1668019801710/a4710e942591b6376ed5ad757ed9507c33a79ff9?sender=u02dad2b8e3b96ab9b15d6187
We have been exploring measure, shape, perimeter and area to answer questions about our own school and playground. We self-direct ourselves by choosing which part of the task to work on, whilst communicating our finding with the rest of the class and contributing to the overall research.
We’re also enjoying using vertical wall spaces for workings!
A group of our upper school pupils were tasked with a challenge to fully research what activities are available for kids in Livingston. They had to work in a small group to find total costs, bus times and costs before voting on the best place to go. They invited Miss Burton to listen to their ideas and pitched their proposition. All of the children were able to convince Miss Burton that a visit to our local cinema via local transport and to visit Hot Flame was the best option. The pupils created their own itinerary using the information they had gathered, were involved in the risk assessment and one of our pupils was responsible for booking of the trip by phone.
This group are now our ‘Upper Skills’ ambassadors and some are looking forward to leading the next challenge… Ready, Steady, Cook 👨🍳
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.#
You can use or create your own kindness advent Calendar to celebrate the lead up to Christmas.
In Bluebell clan we have been working very hard on developing our narrative writing. We changed our shared writing on ‘Cinderella’ and created our very own. Pupils in Bluebell clan used their imagination to develop their characters, theme and setting. We discussed the importance of using adjectives to describe our narrative writing and learned how to use speech marks correctly throughout. We are continuing to self and peer assess our work using our genre and core targets. We used our self and peer assessments to support us to edit our writing. We focused on ‘up levelling’ some of our work by adding more descriptive language. We have developed our ‘Phenomenal wall of words’ which supported us to do this.
In addition to this, we have been excellent authors and illustrators as we manufactured our very own book! We looked at different methods of book binding, chose our materials and planned our writing before making them independently. We loved the opportunity to share this with our parents on Book Week Scotland and are looking forward to share our finished products!
We have enjoyed narrative writing that much that we have chosen to focus our next weeks assembly on our literacy! We have planned this production together and shared out the roles and responsibilities. This involved an invitation committee, a power point team, backdrops and props teams, VCOP team, choreographers for our dancing and our tech and equipment team. We also participated in drama where we learnt about freeze frames and have incorporated this within our assembly. We have been practising lots and cannot wait to share our learning with you all next week!
Please take a look at our literacy learning that took place during Book Week Scotland. We shared our passion, excitement and creativity for reading!
