Category: Calderwood Curriculum

Tummel Clan’s Creative Calculations

This week, we learned about a famous artist called Wassily Kandinsky. We learned that he is well-known for creating abstract paintings using shapes, lines and colour. In Numeracy, we have been exploring place value, with pupils learning to build numbers to 1,000 and 10,000. Inspired by Kandinsky’s “Several Circles”, we created abstract art using size to represent our chosen number, broken into its individual place value parts.

We also had a lot of fun creating our own origami animal bookmarks to celebrate this year’s Maths Week theme, ‘Maths Tales’. Origami involves turning a flat piece of paper into a 3D object, requiring lots of spatial awareness! We also discussed the fractions involved as we folded the paper into halves and quarters. As we creased the paper, we realised how important the relationship between the lines and angles created are to the final design of the origami creation!

 

Tay Clan – Maths Week Scotland

Tay clan have been exploring the water cycle, climate change, habitats and food chains through the context of rivers (our Tay clan namesake).  This week we explored our key question ‘why does it rain so much in Scotland and where does it come from?’.  We also discussed ‘what is weather and how does it exist?’, looking at where it comes from, how it forms clouds and why and how we measure rainfall.

 

We learnt about meteorologists and why they measure rainfall and why this is necessary.  We decided to make our own rain gauges to measure the amount of rain that falls in our area.  We used our measuring skills, that we have been learning in maths lessons, to support us to complete this challenge.  We will explore how to collect, record and analyse our data in future lessons.

 

 

Leven Clan- Maths Week Scotland

This week as part of Maths Week Scotland, Leven Clan became Meteorologists!

Through our IDL topic – Calderwood Clan Explorers we have been learning about water, where it comes from and what creatures live in and around the water. The questions that everyone wanted to know was.. “Why does it rain so much at Calderwood?”.

In answer to this question we have explored the water cycle and why and how weather differs in different areas around the globe. We then used our knowledge of measurement to create a rain gauge from recycled plastic bottles.

Next week we will collect data from our rain gauges to measure how many centimetres of rain fall there has been.

Maths Week Scotland – Schiehallion

In our learning over the last few weeks, Schiehallion have been investigating and learning about place value – making sure we understand the value of each digit within a number. Specifically this week, we have been looking at multiplying and dividing numbers by 10, 100 and even 1000.

We wanted to transfer this learning into some art work – so we created Mondrian art designs using 3 digit numbers as our stimulus. The children used two 3 digit numbers to create a sum, and then used the corresponding dienes blocks to create their pictures.

For example, if our sum came to 675, you would need to use six 100 blocks, seven 10 blocks and 5 single blocks.

I think you’ll agree that they came out really well.

Calderwood Skills: A pupil and family challenge

Please find information about our Pupil/Family challenge linked to our Calderwood Skills focus here:

Calderwood Skills

 

If you would like to enter our challenge, please use this template:

Calderwood Skills Template

If you’d like a hard copy in class, please ask your champion.

 

All entries to be handed to Miss Connor by Tuesday 8th October, winners will be announced on Friday 11th October at Connects.

Leven: Description Writing

In Leven clan, we began our learning about description texts by creating our own sea creatures using line, shape and colour. We then wrote a description explaining our creature to our peers. We tried to use interesting adjectives in order to bring our sea characters to life and make the description exciting for the reader.

This week, we have continued to develop our descriptive writing skills by using the ‘describing bubble’. We used the well known character of Mr Tickle as our stimulus and used as many adjectives and descriptive phrases as we could to describe him.

We then learned about the purpose and structure of a description text, developing our understanding further of each section.

Finally, we wrote our own description text about Mr Tickle, using the skills and knowledge that we have developed.

 

 

Descriptive Writing in Ben Lomond

Ben Lomond Clan have been delving into the art of descriptive writing. We began this journey by writing about our namesake munro. This was a cold piece of work to see what we remembered from last year.

We focused on using adjectives to describe Ben Lomond. The ‘describing bubble’ resource helped us to think about the colour, texture, size and shapes we could see in photographs. We also looked closely at our writing targets, placing emphasis on the importance of punctuation and ensuring that capital letters and full stops are used correctly.

To support our writing, we used oil pastels to create beautiful images of Ben Lomond. This hands-on activity helped us to explore colour and texture while giving us a visual reference for our writing.

Schiehallion – Descriptive Writing

Over the last couple of weeks in Schiehallion we have been looking at descriptive writing. To begin with, we wrote a ‘cold piece’ to see what we managed to remember from last year. We wrote about Schiehallion, as we wanted to explore our namesake munro.

 

After we had written our cold pieces, we started to learn about how we should structure our descriptive writing. Alongside this, we worked on the type of language that you would find in this style of writing – focusing on nouns and adjectives.

 

We learned about different types of nouns – common, proper and collective – and then we identified these in a piece of writing about the Louvre Museum in Paris.

 

Our next step is to plan and write about our local area. Keep your eyes peeled for descriptive pieces about Calderwood estate coming your way.

Tummel: Description Writing

In Tummel Clan, we have been learning how to write a quality description. From our prior learning, we were able to discuss elements of the describing bubble which is used as a prompt to help us add interesting detail to our writing.

As Calderwood Clan Explorers investigating the meaning behind our clan name, we are beginning to learn about Loch Tummel. We listened to the story of “Gloomy the Misty Loch Monster”, making sure to listen to all of the words so that we could draw a detailed picture of Gloomy from the description. We decided we wanted to imagine our own sea creatures which we did, then described them to our partner to see how accurate their drawing would be!

Afterwards, we described our sea creature as a cold piece writing assessment. We were then able to reflect on what went well and think about what personal targets we could set to make our writing even better next time.

Rannoch Clan – Description Writing

In Rannoch this week we have started to look at descriptive writing. We began by writing our cold piece on a sea creature that we had designed and created in our art lesson. We made sure to add lots of detail so we had lots of parts to describe!

Since then, we have explored description writing further and started to look at the tools which will help us with writing. Rannoch enjoyed reading the Mr Men book about Mr Tickle and used this as our next descriptive writing piece. Firstly, we used the describing bubble to create a plan for our writing which helped us come up with some great adjectives to describe Mr Tickle. Then we looked at the correct structure of a descriptive piece.

Rannoch clan created some wonderful descriptions of Mr Tickle this week!

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