Dundee – Page 2 – Calderwood Primary and Nursery

Dundee Clan – Water Cycle and Money

The Water Cycle

As part of our learning about the Rainforest we explored the Water Cycle. We learnt words such as evaporation, condensation and precipitation. We discussed what each word means and what takes place at each of these points in the cycle. We created a water cycle in a bag experiment and placed it on our clan window. Hopefully we will see the water cycle in action.

Money

We have been learning about money. We have been revising the coins and notes we use, totalling money amounts and making amounts in different ways. We also created our own shops with items and prices displayed and went shopping in each other’s shops, recording items we would like to purchase, noting their cost. We discussed totalling amounts and starting with adding the pounds first and then the pence finding that this was an efficient strategy to use.

Book Week Scotland – Dundee Clan

Dundee clan have had a great week celebrating Book Week Scotland. We made a collaborative poster of ‘The Magic Faraway Tree’ which is our class novel and have displayed this in our Discovery Den.

We also enjoyed a visit from a real-life author- Jo Wilcox who shared one of her stories with us.

On Friday, We dressed up as some of our favourite characters from books and enjoyed a book tasting session with our families. We were able to share some of our learning about the rainforest too. We shared our animal factfiles, our rainforest story and our layers of the rainforest flip book.

Calderwood Careers 2023/24 Terms 2 & 3

We are so excited to launch this years Calderwood Careers! This is an opportunity for P4 -P7 to apply for a lunch time job around our school. If you would like to apply for a position, please complete the application form by Monday 13th November. This can be completed at home or school. Remember to be confident and share all the amazing skills you have!

Dundee Clan – Term 2 learning

Dundee Clan have got off to a great start in term 2. We began our learning about the rainforest through reading the book ‘The Great Kapock Tree’ by Lynne Cherry. We loved listening to this and had so many questions and wonders that we want to explore further. So far, we have learnt about the 7 continents in the world, where rainforests are in the world, why they are so warm and wet and what animals live there through exploring habitats. We were surprised to learn that there is more than one rainforest in the world and that people live in the rainforest! We look forward to learning more.

We have really enjoyed our visits from Mrs De Luen from NYCOS – The National Youth Choir of Scotland. We have learnt about keeping the beat in music, rhythm in music using notation and words to support us, and the pitch in music identifying high and low sounds as well as being introduced to notation. We played lots of games to support our learning and particularly loved having the parachute out.

We are learning about a new genre of writing – narrative writing (story writing). We are confident with the purpose, structure and language features of this genre and have had a go at creating a scary story – The Haunted House, together as a clan. We loved learning about onomatopoeia words and how these types of words can add excitement and interest to our story writing. We are looking forward to creating narrative texts based in the rainforest.

TEAMS

For all parents and children of Dundee Clan,

Please click on the TEAMS guide below to access a PDF file of how to access and use TEAMS at home. The guide explains how to log-in, how to access files and how to access class notebook. I hope you all find this useful.

TEAMS step by step guide

Term 1 – Dundee Clan

Term 1

We have had an extremely busy and exciting term 1 in Dundee Clan. Please click on the links to access all the sways which show our learning and hard-work for the term. These can also be found in TEAMS in the relevant folders.

Calderwood Can Explorers: https://sway.office.com/FlL3Pa94r8njCymc?ref=Link

Calderwood Communicates: https://sway.office.com/ahKrI0qWNH2GW9SK?ref=Link

Calderwood Counts: https://sway.office.com/f6fvZSk9mDTIEmHF?ref=Link

Calderwood Cares: https://sway.office.com/06aSfHkt0KTYWg0w?ref=Link

Calderwood Clan Explorers – Dundee

Calderwood Clan Explorers

Throughout the first term we have been exploring our namesake clan ‘Dundee’. We completed some research to find out where Dundee is located in Scotland and what important landmarks can be found there. We explored the Tay Bridge, the RRS Discovery ship, the V & A museum and Broughty Castle. We completed research through reading and researching online. We presented our findings to the rest of our clan.

In Maths, we discussed the rules of 1-line of symmetry. We practised this skill by using pictures of different landmarks from Dundee and drawing the other half of the picture to make sure it was symmetrical. We loved this. We realised a lot of buildings are symmetrical and discussed how this skill is used in architecture in the world of work.

We have been learning how to identify the location of a landmark on a map by using grid references.

Finally, we created a cityscape of Dundee. We explored warm and cool colours, discussing how these make us feel and how they are seen in a sunset. We created our sunset pictures using watercolours discussing how to blend the colours together. We explored how much water is needed to get the colour just right. After our pictures dried, we cut out our chosen Dundee landmark from black sugar paper to make our cityscape, These are displayed in our cabin and look beautiful.

Please click on the link to look at our Calderwood Clan Explorer Sway.

Go to this Sway

https://sway.office.com/FlL3Pa94r8njCymcref

Description Writing

Dundee Clan began their writing journey by exploring description writing.

We completed our first piece of writing, describing our favourite animal. We remembered to use the describing bubble to support us which reminds us to describe size, colour, texture, position, number, shape and what our animal does.

We explored the structure of description writing and learnt the names and purpose of the different sections in a description text. We have come up with hand signals to represent each section which will help us remind us about the order in which to build our descriptive pieces of writing.

Finally, we explored the language features of a description text, looking closely at the nouns, adjectives and pronouns, recording them in a grid that we can refer to later when writing our own descriptions.

We will continue to explore this genre of writing further by writing description texts and exploring descriptive passages in our reading lessons.