Clan News – Page 27 – Calderwood Primary and Nursery

Champion Conversations – P5-7 Helpers

STEM in The Bens

STEM is a huge part of who we are at Calderwood.

Recently, the Bens have been exploring the area of chemistry and chemical reactions.

We started by giving the pupils the chance to experience first hand a basic chemical reaction – water, oil and an effervescent tablet! – They were given the instructions but no adult support to carry it out.

This encouraged independent and collaborative learning & problem solving skills.

Next, we watched and observed the magic that took place! The comments, questions and curiosity from them was fantastic.

-“why is mine fizzing so much?”

-“why does the oil sit on top of the water?”

-What makes it do that?”

With our curiosity activated, we learned all about the chemical reaction & creation of carbon dioxide.

The following week, we conducted a fair test and began to explore how scientists set up testing by ensuring variables & conditions were all the same, only making one change at a time.

Children worked amazingly together to investigate their own scientific enquiry questions such as:

“what happens to the amount of fizz if I change the amount of tablets?”

“what happens to the oil bubbles if I use milk instead of water?”- (warning, it smelled awful!)

“what happens to the amount of fizzing time if I use less water?”

Well done, Bens – it was fantastic to watch you experience the wonders of STEM on your own.

Remembering Queen Elizabeth II

Today, across our clans we took some time to reflect on this moment in history and celebrate the life of Queen Elizabeth. Some clans made pictures of her, discussed what she did for the United Kingdom and beyond, wrote poems and reflected on her achievements.

Some of the older clans also watched a Newsround clip.

Calderwood Can Certificates

We are so proud of all our learners who received a Calderwood Can certificate this week! There are lots of achievement across our Calderwood Communicates, Calderwood Cares & Calderwood Counts!

Description Writing

In Bramble Clan, we were given the challenge to write a description text about our favourite animal. Through this piece of writing, we had to show what we knew already about how to write a description text.

To start, we listened to a description of an animal and had to guess what it might be and explain our reasons why. Next, we listened to the description again and tried to draw what we thought it looked like. We had to listen hard to the words in the description to support us with this. We compared our drawings and discussed what words helped us to draw the animal and how some sentences could have given us a bit more information or detail.

We then embarked on our challenge of writing a description about our favourite animal. We had to include what it was, what it looked like, what it did and why it was our favourite animal.

We enjoyed writing about this. We will continue to learn about writing a description text to develop our understanding and writing skills further.

Thistle Clan 9.9.22

This week in Thistle we have enjoyed moving our bodies and practicing our skills in balance and stamina. We have been using a variety of equipment to help us with static and dynamic balance.

We have also been investigating whole number and have enjoyed using a variety of different materials and resources to help us with numeracy activities and challenges this week.

We also have been continuing to look at different addition strategies in our Number talks. We have been talking about partitioning, friendly numbers and using a number line.

In French this week we consolidated our vocabulary from last week around hair colour and moved on to looking at eye colour. Children took time to ask “Tu et comment?” (What are you like?”) and had a go at answering both verbally and written. We then took a class survey of eye colour using our key vocabulary.

In writing we have been focused on the key features of description genre. We started off by writing a piece without any input to see what we could remember from last year. We have then been exploring a passage called “The Moon” and investigating the key features and vocabulary of a descriptive piece. This week we wrote a model together of what a good description looks like called “The Sun.” We will now use this piece to support us next week as we begin to write independently about the brain – related to our focus of Calderwood Cranium Consultants.

Here is the document we use to support us and help us self and peer assess a descriptive piece of writing. 1st & 2nd Level Narrative_self_peer_assessment_placemat

Calderwood Can Certificates

Our first certificates of Chapter 2 of Calderwood were presented at our Calderwood Connects today! We are so proud of all learners who received a certificate. Well done for showing kindness, effort and perseverance!

Calderwood Connects

This Week in Thistle!

This week in Thistle clan we have been exploring our skills in balance during PE. We have been making balancing activities more challenging and then timing ourselves using stopwatches to see how long we can do them for.

We have also been looking at the strategy of partitioning during our number talks. We have been using progressively bigger numbers and have been practicing applying our strategy.

Here are some examples of how we have been laying out our partitioning answers;

In French we have begun to investigate hair descriptions, we have been taking our time to listen and repeat the key phrase “J’ai les cheveux…” and then we have begun building our vocabulary to describe hair colour, length and texture.

Finally we would like to share our health and wellbeing focus of Friendship. This week we have explored how to make and keep friends. We have enjoyed discussing personal experiences and giving advice to others. We created a friendship soup and added the ingredients we think make up a perfect friendship;