Category: STEM
Bring Your Own Device
SUMDOG – Calderwood Counts
Maths Week Scotland is just around the corner which means – Sumdog Competition time!
The contest will begin at 8 am on Friday 23rd September and end on Thursday 29th September. Your child can access the competition by clicking here or logging in via the following link and using their unique username, password, and school code Calderwood2:
https://www.sumdog.com/user/sign_in
This competition is a fantastic way to compete against lots of other Primary students, have fun and develop numeracy/maths skills at the very same time. Your child has received a card which includes their unique username and password to keep safe at home. If you have any issues with accessing Sumdog or using the details on the card please do get in touch with the school office as we’d be more than happy to assist.
Your child may be set some questions which they whizz through at the start. Completing these will support them to answer appropriate questions during the Competition so please do hang in there and complete them!
STEM in The Bens
STEM is a huge part of who we are at Calderwood.
Recently, the Bens have been exploring the area of chemistry and chemical reactions.
We started by giving the pupils the chance to experience first hand a basic chemical reaction – water, oil and an effervescent tablet! – They were given the instructions but no adult support to carry it out.
This encouraged independent and collaborative learning & problem solving skills.
Next, we watched and observed the magic that took place! The comments, questions and curiosity from them was fantastic.
-“why is mine fizzing so much?”
-“why does the oil sit on top of the water?”
-What makes it do that?”
With our curiosity activated, we learned all about the chemical reaction & creation of carbon dioxide.
The following week, we conducted a fair test and began to explore how scientists set up testing by ensuring variables & conditions were all the same, only making one change at a time.
Children worked amazingly together to investigate their own scientific enquiry questions such as:
“what happens to the amount of fizz if I change the amount of tablets?”
“what happens to the oil bubbles if I use milk instead of water?”- (warning, it smelled awful!)
“what happens to the amount of fizzing time if I use less water?”
Well done, Bens – it was fantastic to watch you experience the wonders of STEM on your own.
Why Not Me Event
Creative Calderwood – STEM
Today we were delighted to host the Primary Science Development Officers from authorities across Scotland. They were all given a tour of our school building and heard all about the amazing STEM learning which is going on every day at Calderwood Primary School!
Click here to see the Sway for yourself and catch up on the highlights from a Year of STEM at Calderwood.
Play in Primary 1 our Rationale
Please see below our rationale for Play-Based learning and teaching in Primary 1.
Term 4 in the Bens
Last term, to begin our celebration of British Science Week 2022, the Ben Clans created a STEM takeover for each Clan in our school! The groups created a variety of lessons to deliver to the younger clans. Tay Clan learned about the skeleton, Rannoch Clan learned all about space and our solar system, Ness created scrap robots and used a sphero to move the robot, Bluebell Clan looked at the layers of the Earth and Bramble focussed on food chains in our oceans. Mull, Shetland and Orkney developed an understanding of space, star constellations and the universe.
The experience generated a lot of discussion around earth, space and the universe, informing the direction of learning for this term.
Our cross curricular topic this term is science based and will be looking at the origins of life and the habitability of earth and other planets. We began this week by watching a short clip narrated by David Attenborough about the tree of life and then researched the evolution of a penguin, inputting our research onto Padlet. Please click here to see our research.
Alongside this, we will also began understanding the different viewpoints offered in the creation stories from different world religions. We started this week with the Christian creation story and began to understand that there are similarities with that and the creation story in Judaism. We created our own versions of the Judeo-Christian creation story using powerpoint, imovies including greenscreen and SWAY.
Literacy
We are beginning to learn about the features and structure of narrative writing. We have been exploring our reading books to develop our understanding of the orientation, complication and resolution found within this genre of text. This week, we had a go at writing a narrative based around a theme of racing. We looked at a good example and deconstructed it so we could understand how to write one ourselves. One of the Bens wrote a story called ‘The Horse Race’. It is a good example as it has a clear orientation stating who, when and where; the complication is clear and includes direct speech and accurate punctuation and the resolution explains what happens and solves the problem, bringing the story to a conclusion.
We are excited about the term ahead and look forward to sharing with you soon. Watch this space!!
The Bens 🙂
We have a winner!
We are extremely proud to announce that an invention created by a child from Ness Clan won the East of Scotland for their age category. Their invention, The Automatic Pencil, will be displayed at the University of Edinburgh Exhibition on 18th May and they will also recieve their certificate and trophy at an Award Ceremony later that day.
We had a huge number of entries of an extremely high standard so all children involved in the If you were an engineer what would you do? competition should be extremely proud of themselves. A special thanks also goes to Mr Clarke (Calderwood Parent) for giving the children in Ness, Rannoch and Tay Clans inspiration to begin inventing through presenting to the clans on the topic of his STEM career.
If you would like to find out more about this award please click here.
Calderwood Can: 11/03/22
Our Ben Lawers and Lomond Clans started British Science Week by organising and teaching a Science Friday Takeover with all our clans.
They nominated children from each clan for a certificate for their contribution and participation in the science tasks!
Congratulations everyone and thank you to our Ben Clans for organising such a successful event.
