Cosy Corner Club – Upper Challenge 1

A group of our upper school pupils were tasked with a challenge to fully research what activities are available for kids in Livingston. They had to work in a small group to find total costs, bus times and costs before voting on the best place to go. They invited Miss Burton to listen to their ideas and pitched their proposition. All of the children were able to convince Miss Burton that a visit to our local cinema via local transport and to visit Hot Flame was the best option. The pupils created their own itinerary using the information they had gathered, were involved in the risk assessment and one of our pupils was responsible for booking of the trip by phone.

This group are now our ‘Upper Skills’ ambassadors and some are looking forward to leading the next challenge… Ready, Steady, Cook 👨‍🍳

Assembly and Narrative Writing in Bramble

Bramble clan have been very busy, preparing for our first Bramble clan assembly at Calderwood.  We have all worked together, as a fantastic team, to create our assembly.  We all took on different jobs and roles to prepare for this and then brought it all together, to showcase our learning about the Brain, and practised really hard.  We had invites to make, props to make, costumes to organise, the script to write, words to practise, displays to make and songs to learn and sing, with actions.  We have loved using the stage in the arena and have really enjoyed acting and performing.  We have had a fantastic time working on our assembly together and have enjoyed sharing our learning with you all.

We have been exploring traditional tales, fables, myths and legends in our IDL lessons and have learnt what these are and what the main features are.  In writing, we delved deeper and looked at the traditional tale of The Little Mermaid.  We found that the original story of The Little Mermaid is very different from the one we already know.  Together, as a clan, we retold the story using our own words, making sure we used the correct structure – orientation, complication and resolution.  Our challenge, was to use this story as a basis for our own.  We could use the story and change the characters or setting to make it different from the original.  Instead of the Little Mermaid, some of us changed the character to an Arctic Fox, a curious turtle or a dragon.  We kept some parts of the story the same and changed others.  We created 24 different stories from the one tale!

We worked hard on our stories, focussing on a different section each week.  We wrote each section and then re-read it, and edited parts of it.  We enjoyed editing our stories- scoring out parts or adding in parts, showing- and feeling what it is like to be an author.

 

In IDL lessons, we learnt more about the book-making process and researched the different roles involved in this process.  We found out that there are many different roles involved in the process such as the author, illustrator, designer, editor and publisher.  After researching this we moved on to making our own books.  We took the story we had been creating in our writing lessons and designed what we would like our book of this to be like and what materials we would like to use to make it.

We have been busy creating our own books to include our own creative story that we have been writing.  It was very exciting to transform our work from a piece of writing in our jotter to our own book that we can read to others.  We are super proud of our work.#

 

Blogging Friday in Bluebell

In Bluebell clan we have been working very hard on developing our narrative writing. We changed our shared writing on ‘Cinderella’ and created our very own. Pupils in Bluebell clan used their imagination to develop their characters, theme and setting. We discussed the importance of using adjectives to describe our narrative writing and learned how to use speech marks correctly throughout. We are continuing to self and peer assess our work using our genre and core targets. We used our self and peer assessments to support us to edit our writing. We focused on ‘up levelling’ some of our work by adding more descriptive language. We have developed our ‘Phenomenal wall of words’ which supported us to do this.

In addition to this, we have been excellent authors and illustrators as we manufactured our very own book! We looked at different methods of book binding, chose our materials and planned our writing before making them independently. We loved the opportunity to share this with our parents on Book Week Scotland and are looking forward to share our finished products!

We have enjoyed narrative writing that much that we have chosen to focus our next weeks assembly on our literacy! We have planned this production together and shared out the roles and responsibilities. This involved an invitation committee, a power point team, backdrops and props teams, VCOP team, choreographers for our dancing and our tech and equipment team. We also participated in drama where we learnt about freeze frames and have incorporated this within our assembly. We have been practising lots and cannot wait to share our learning with you all next week!

Clan Connects: Thistle

Thistle Clan hosted our second Calderwood Connects for families on Friday. They had been learning about traditional legends, tales and stories as part of their Literacy, Book Week Scotland Context. The children created a dramas sharing their learning in fun and engaging ways, through drama, digital videos, signing and dancing.

A huge well done to Thistle Clan, we are super proud of your performance, and the creative way you shared your learning.

Clan Connects: Ben Lawers

Ben Lawers hosted our first Calderwood Connects for families on Friday. They had been learning about the West Lothian Food Bank as part of their Calder Communities Context. The children created a drama centring around everyone needs help at some point in their life, sharing different times when families might use a food back.

 

We also welcome representatives from West Lothian Foodbank along to watch.

 

A huge well done to Ben Lawers Clan, we are super proud of your performance, and the creative way you shared this important message.

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