Bluebell – Page 4 – Calderwood Primary and Nursery

NSPCC’s Speak out. Stay safe. online programme

This term we participated in the NSPCC’s Speak out. Stay safe. online programme. This consists of an online assembly and supporting classroom based activities. Speak out. Stay safe. is a safeguarding programme available to all primary schools in the UK and Channel Islands. It aims to help children understand abuse in all its forms and to recognise the signs of abuse in a child friendly way. Children are taught to speak out if they are worried, either to a trusted adult or Childline.

In the online assembly, the Speak out. Stay safe. messages were delivered in a fun and interactive way with the help of their mascot Buddy as well as special guest appearances from Ant and Dec.

We studied the content of the materials and are extremely confident that they are appropriate for primary-school-aged children. By the end of the programme, the aim is that children feel empowered – knowing how they can speak out and stay safe.

If you would like to know more about the Speak out. Stay safe. programme you can find information on the NSPCC website www.nspcc.org.uk/speakout

Additional resources

Adapted assembly for home use

The NSPCC has also developed an adapted version of their assembly for parents/carers to use at home with their children. This can be found here: www.nspcc.org.uk/keeping-children-safe/support-for-parents/safety. With the help of celebrities, the film focuses on how a child can get support if they have any worries or concerns.

To complement the assembly, there are some resources that can be used to enable further discussion whilst doing activities with your children. These are hosted on the NSPCC website www.nspcc.org.uk/activities.

Online safety hub

You may also like to visit the NSPCC Online Safety Hub where you will find advice and information on a range of different online safety topics including gaming, social media, sharing nudes, parental controls and more.

You will also find online safety information for families of children with additional needs and disabilities. We have worked with Ambitious about Autism and parents and carers who have children with additional needs and disabilities to create activities to help talk about online safety which you can find at www.nspcc.org.uk/keeping-children-safe/online-safety/online-safety-families-children-with-send.

Childline Under 12’s Website

Childline also have a website with age appropriate advice for primary school children on topics such as bullying. It also has games and other interactive tools. Your child can visit it at www.childline.org.uk/kids.

If you’d like to know more about the NSPCC’s work, or take a look at the wide range of information and advice which is available for parents and carers, please visit their website www.nspcc.org.uk/parents.

Talking PANTS with your children

Talk PANTS is a simple conversation to help keep your child safe from sexual abuse. From P through to S, each letter of PANTS provides a simple but valuable rule that can help keep your child safe. You can find out more and download the free resources at www.nspcc.org.uk/pants.

Penguin and Ladybird have partnered with the NSPCC to create a brand new Pantosaurus book aimed at children ages 4 – 8. You can find copies of the new book on sale, either in Matalan’s selected stores and online, selected SPAR stores or at https://shop.nspcc.org.uk/. All profits from the sale of this book will support the NSPCC.

Support the NSPCC

You may be interested in the NSPCC’s new selection of BUDDY goodies available from the NSPCC shop at https://shop.nspcc.org.uk/collections/buddy which make perfect gifts for children – and all profits go to help keep children safe.

Home Learning Choice Boards

Please find below a copy of the home learning choice boards for Term 1. Our approach to home learning is flexible to ensure we met the needs of our families and children’s extra curricular activities, therefore the amount of tasks you complete are up to you as a family. The tasks are a mixture of online and discussion/ paper tasks. If children choose to share any of their home learning with their clan they can do this via their champion.

The tasks are also uploaded to Seesaw/ Teams. Children will bring home their log in cards this week, please ensure you keep these in a safe place.

You can find further information here:

Our Parent Council are currently setting up a working group to consult on our approaches to home learning to ensure we meet the needs of our families.

P1 Home Learning Choice Board T1

P2 Home Learning Board- Term 1

Primary 3 Home Learning Board– Term 1

P4 Home Learning Choice Board_Term 1

P5 Home Learning Choice Board_Term 1

P6 Home Learning Choice Board_Term 1

P7 Home Learning Choice Board_Term 1

Term 1 Writing in Bluebell

Over this term, Bluebell will be developing their skills in descriptive writing. We have started to look at, discuss and apply the structures of description using our PM example texts. This will gradually build up into pupils creating their very own descriptive texts, applying their learning independently.

To support the development of our writing skills, pupils have and will continue to throughout the year, to work on the principles of VCOP.
V – quality vocabulary
C- Sentence connectors to construct more detailed sentences
O- Sentence openers
P – Punctuation

We became ‘Sentence Doctors’ to cure some sick sentences by applying VCOP. We were excited to share some of our cured sentences with Miss Burton. Pupils in Bluebell worked extremely hard to make considered choices for their vocabulary.

First Week Back – Bluebell

We have been very busy in the Bluebell Clan getting to know each other and our Champion. We started the new term learning more about one another, discussing our summer adventures and participating in various ‘Getting to know you’ activities.

We showed Miss Ali how much we love arts and crafts by drawing our very own self-portraits. We drew illustrations of our summer adventures into our sunglasses and designed an ‘All about me’ t-shirt which shared our hobbies, favourite colour, favourite animals and likes and dislikes. This has been made into ‘Our Clan is our family’ display, inspired by a lovely book we read called ‘Our Class is our Family’.

After reading this book, we discussed how we are all connected and how we must make everyone feel welcome. We also discussed our role and responsibility within our clan rooms and came up with the following roles: milk monitors, cloakroom monitors, line leader, door holder, technology monitors and henry hoovers.

We came up with a minion themed recognition board and have been working very hard to get our minions onto the banana by meeting our Clan targets! We have been discussing noise levels in our Clan room as well as our relentless routines for indoor breaks/lunch, gym hall and our conga. We discussed how this should look, feel and sound like. We also created great teacher adverts and discussed what our clan members should look, feel and sound like. We have been learning about our rights and how this looks within our Clan room. From interesting discussion, we came up with our Seven rules for our Clan charter.

These are our rules:

1. Always be kind and friendly to each other.

2. Respect everyone and look after our clan property.

3. Play and learn safely.

4. Make everyone feel included in play and learning.

5. Respect everyone’s differences such as views and opinions.

6. Work towards our clan targets, individual targets, and achievements.

7. Learn from your mistakes!

In addition to all our hard work, we attended our very first Calderwood Connects for this term. We were very pleased that Mrs Grieve complimented us on how good our sitting and listening was during this assembly. As a reward, we played ‘Splat’ the following day and had lots of fun teaching Miss Ali how to play it!

This week we have also been doing a lot of team building activities such as creating our shields and designing our Clan flag. We also came up with our table group names and have designed our pupil charter. Our Clan voted for the ‘Bluebell theme’ and have had lots of fun creating our own Bluebells.

With Mrs Robertson we participated in the ‘Paperchain Challenge’ where we continued to work hard to develop our teamwork and problem solving skills. Our challenge involved creating the longest paperchain! We were able to identify the skills required to work effectively in a team and demonstrated this superbly. Teams were randomly generated and we enjoyed experiencing the skills and qualities of different classmates. We are starting to introduce specific roles within teams that can help to promote positive teamwork and a range or skills development e.g. leadership, time keeping and organisation.

Once our challenge time was up, we had to consider the best way of working out the longest chain. This learning experience took us outdoors to investigate the range of materials that could support our measuring. Can you guess the longest paperchain…? 9m – well done to the winning team!