Clan News – Page 13 – Calderwood Primary and Nursery

Mrs Morrison and Mrs Robertson were so proud of our super basketball team ‘Calderwood Knicks’ when they played in the silver playoffs on Friday 26th May. From only forming our teams in October, to now making it into the playoffs, is a huge achievement that they should be proud off. We came 6th in the silver league and got in some tremendous baskets – even some of the professional players were impressed! Well done to all of you, we cannot wait to see how Calderwood basketball teams develop next year!

Calderwood Can 02.06.23

Calderwood Clan Championships 2023

Calderwood Can 19.05.23

Ben Lawers Cross Country Event

Our Ben Lawers Clan did us very proud at our most recent cross country event at West Calder High School, where we had four of the girls place within the top seven and three of our boys finishing withing the top five. We were up against other schools from our cluster and our girls winning, secured Calderwood Primary School girls team to represent West Lothian in the next cross country event. Huge congratulations to everyone that participated and did themselves proud.

Well done Calderwood, next stop, the stars!!!

Thistle Clan 5.5.23

What a fantastic start to term 4 for Thistle Clan!

We have got straight in to exploring our Cultivating Calderwood Focus. Have a little look at our journey so far

In PE we have been investigating cross country running, spot us developing our stamina, endurance, pace and strength here:

In Literacy we have been investigating information reports. We have had a go at our cold piece, remembering what we knew from last year. We then marked this against our targets and got to work investigating the key language features of an information text. Once this was done we used our notes from reading to build a plan as a whole clan and then write a model piece all together. This will now help us as we begin to write with more independence.

Bramble Clan ‘Cultivating calderwood’

Bramble clan are well under way with their new IDL ‘Cultivating Calderwood’.

We have been learning about the water cycle through reading and decided to create our own water cycle in a bag. We added our predictions of what we might see happen on to a post-it note and then discussed what was happening and learnt about the process of the Water Cycle.

Next, we have been looking at recycling and what reduce, reuse, recycle means. We did some note-taking in our reading lessons and then created posters about what we had learnt about these 3 areas. We are more aware of what we do already and what we might do to look after our planet by recycling. We have chosen to create art from items that need recycled as part of our home learning grid.

We planted sunflowers and have positioned them in our area on the windowsill. We are going to plot their growth on a labelled line graph. After day 13, we have seen a lot of growth and are very excited to see these each day, especially after the weekend. One of our pupils has planted an orange seed he brought in from home to see if it will grow. We planted 2 in different conditions – 1 in soil with water and sunlight and 1 with water and sunlight only. So far none of them have grown. We will continue to monitor this.

We planted some seeds at the end of last term, in our school garden and discussed what a plant needs to grow. We applied this knowledge to explore what a sunflower needs to grow and what the life cycle of a sunflower might look like. We drew the life cycle of a sunflower, showing each stage of its life and what it will look like. These are displayed on our IDL learning wall in our corridor.

Art

We explored different art methods in different clans with Mrs Scobie, Miss Ali or Miss Quinn. With Miss Quinn, we looked at 1 point perspective art looking out of a greenhouse towards a house. With Mrs Scobie we looked at 1-point perspective looking into a greenhouse. With Miss Ali, we used watercolours to draw flowers. We were very pleased with our results. These are displayed in our area.

Finally, we have been exploring the different parts of a flower. We have learnt the names of each part, their purpose and what they look like. To look at these and identify these in real life, we dissected a tulip. We then placed each of the parts on a flower lab mat, stating the length and purpose of each. We enjoyed this exploration and even extracted pollen from the stamen. We were fascinated to find out that a flower has both male and female parts.