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 Magic Miles 2022

Our Calderwood Magic Miles fundraiser was a huge success. We would like to give special thanks to our Parent Council for organising and to all our children, families and champions who took part. You racked up a phenomenal amount of miles and raised a significant amount of money which will be used to develop our Outdoor Learning at Calderwood.

GRAND TOTAL:

Nursery £1,331.50
School £4,859.85
Total £6,191.35

 

Miles Completed Nursery 153.99
School 680.98
Total 834.97

MILES

All children involved received a special Calderwood Magic Miles Certificate today as recognition of your great achievement. We celebrating this success at Calderwood Connects today.

Check out some of you in action!

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West Lothian Sumdog Maths Contest: 11.3.22 – 17.3.22

Huge good luck to all our amazing Calderwood Primary School Children, they have now been entered into the West Lothian Sumdog Maths Contest! The contest will run between Friday 11th March and Thursday 17th March. Your child can access the competition by logging in via the following link and using their unique username and password along with the 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. If your child has forgotten their details, please do get in touch with the school office as we’d be more than happy to assist.

A Week in the Life of the Bens

What fun we’ve had this week in Ben Lawers and Ben Lomond!

We have got inspired in our 2D-shape learning, by applying coding skills we honed earlier this year, to develop our understanding of the qualities and properties of shapes.

We also explored our creativity skills through a Community Art Project with Svetlana, a Community Art Champion. We used different mediums to create shapes inspired by water and leaves to create a powerful and dynamic finished piece.

For literacy we have been working hard on using Reflective Reading Strategies to help us develop our understanding of a text. We used the Point, Evidence, Explain (PEE) technique in reply to questions posed. This has encouraged us to look for answers hidden within and beyond the text, through a use of based quotes to back up our points.

First we had to fix our books shut with a Post-it Note, to ensure we weren’t getting any clues from the text. We had to use the information from the covers of the book to make a prediction about what we thought it was going to be about. We looked for clues in the illustrations, blurb and words from the title to complete our PEE answers.

After that, we had a chance to read our stories on our own or with a partner. Our next challenge was to use our clarifying skills to share our understanding of an interesting or important word or phrase. To do this, we used a thesaurus, an online dictionary or discussions with others in our clan. Here are some of the PEE answers we created. We know that we will continue to work on this skill and are looking forward to being able to create persuasive and detailed answers.

After School Sports Clubs

Now that COVID-19 guidance for schools has changed, we are excited that after school sport clubs run by Active Schools and Local Clubs will commence on week beginning 21st February and run for 6 weeks.

The clubs were allocated on a first come first saved basis. If your child has received/not received a place in an after school club they will receive a letter today (9.2.22) with further information.

P1-3 children can wear their P.E. kit to school and P4-6 children should bring their P.E. kit to change into.

Parents should collect their child at 4:05pm outside the main school entrance & office. If possible, they should also wear a mask.

 

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