Ben Lomond – Page 8 – Calderwood Primary and Nursery

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 🙂

Ben Lomond P7 Transition Meeting

Email for Ben Lomond

Dear parent/ carer,

As your child is in P7 next session we would like to invite you to a meeting with myself and the Depute Head Teacher of West Calder High (our cluster high school) to discuss what transition opportunities there will be for your child in Primary 7. The meeting will be held in Calderwood Primary in the Arena (please bring along a mask) on 25th May at 6:30pm.

Kind regards,

Miss Burton

Calderwood Tours – Ben Lawers/Ben Lomond

Term 4 Calderwood Careers: P4-6

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.

West Lothian Sumdog Competition Starts Today!

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.

World Book Day!

Today we had great fun in Calderwood Primary School celebrating World Book Day. To spread the love of reading even further your child will have a £1 book token which you can find out more about by clicking here.

To celebrate World Book Day, the Ben Clans were able to be reading buddies with Mull, Orkney and Shetland Clans. The younger children became authors this morning as they wrote all about space. This fun was shared by the older children too, they were given time to free-write and could share this with their buddies later in the day.

Mull Clan, Bens Lawers and Ben Lomond:

Orkney, Bens Lawers and Ben Lomond

Shetland, Bens Lawers and Ben Lomond

In Ness and Rannoch Clan the children have been learning about different setting in books. To celebrate World Book Day they searched the libraries to find books with different setting and then used new and exciting adjectives to describe the settings they found.

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.