As part of Primary 1’s ‘Calderwood Creatures’ context for learning. They plan to make a Bug Hotel with the children. We are looking for donations of any resources from our lovely Calderwood community. If you can help please let us know!
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Please see below our first edition of the Calderwood Chronicle
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!
What other challenges will we face this year in Bluebell?
The Ben’s have been learning about values that are important to them. In class they were given a big list of values in which they were to narrow these down to their top 15, then their top 10. Once these values were narrowed down, pupils put them into a core value matrix. These top 10 values were drawn against one another to decide which one was more favourable. The values were narrowed down to their top 6. The Ben’s then had the creative freedom to decide how to represent these 6 core values. Some of the ideas include; poster, paintings, videos, PowerPoints and poems. This then led to creating their class charter in which they decided between them the top 6 values for the class. Pupils had the opportunity to see each others work and look at the creative ideas in the clan. Pupil’s have the opportunity to discuss their ideas at home.
Our Clan is a Family
Over the last 2 weeks, Bramble Clan have been learning more about each other and have welcomed new children into our clan family. Together we read ‘Our Class is a family’ and discussed that, during school days, we work and play together as a family.
One of our favourite activities was creating our class portraits. First of all, we designed our own set of sunglasses and inside the sunglasses we wrote and drew about what we did in our Summer holidays. Next, we followed a step by step guide on how to draw our self-portrait. We had to look closely at the details of our faces to make sure we drew our portraits as close to real-life as possible. Finally, we designed and created a t-shirt to go with our portraits. In our t-shirt we drew and wrote all about ourselves including our favourite hobbies, family, favourite place in the world, favourite subject in school and 3 words to describe ourselves. We have displayed our ‘family’ portraits in our clan room. During our clan chat we were able to share our portraits with each other and learn more about each other.
We have discussed what we wanted to include in our clan room and have included a calm area with lovely, soft cushions and calming items to help us relax. We have also begun to develop our library area with a selection of books and some magazines to explore and we will continue to develop this area to support us in our literacy learning. We have enjoyed using these areas during DEAR (Drop Everything and Read) time.
We discussed our daily routines and jobs for in school and in our clan room. We know that our clan family need to work together to make sure our day runs smoothly and that we all take responsibility for the different jobs that need to be done for the day. We have been working together as a great team already!
Our final task, this week, was to look at developing and designing our clan charter. We looked at a list of children’s rights and decided on those that are most important to us in the classroom. Through this learning, we have decided on a list of rules and expectations to make sure that we respect these rights for ourselves and each other and have designed our clan charter which will be displayed in our Clan room.
It has been a fantastic two weeks and we have settled well into our new clan family.
Thank you for your patience as we navigate the world of Seesaw!
New logs in will go home with Primary 1-4 at the end of this week. They expire after a year, so that is why your current one isn’t working.
Primary 4 will no longer to use Seesaw but will move to Teams, it will take them a few weeks of training on how to use Teams before they start to use it as a journal.
For families who where at Calderwood Primary in 2021-22 we will archive those clans. This means you have 30 days to download their journal from their previous clan. You need access to a netbook, laptop or computer to do this and can do this as explained below:
You can also find these instructions here:
We have had a fantastic first week in Primary 1.
Please enjoy seeing some of our magic moments below!
This week we have welcomed lots of new children and families to our Nursery! The children have been amazing at learning the nursery routines, exploring their new environment and making friends. Our garden has been particularly popular! 
Glow Blogs uses cookies to enhance your experience on our service. By using this service or closing this message you consent to our use of those cookies. Please read our Cookie Policy.