Please click on the link below to look at Rannoch clan’s term 4 learning. This will continue to be updated.
Category: Clan News
Rannoch Clan Writing
Writing – The Naughty Troll
Rannoch clan were shocked this week to find that one of their learning spaces was extremely messy and Mrs Scobie showed them a picture of the school playground with lots of litter lying around in it. Mrs Scobie suggested that it might have been a cheeky troll that was up to mischief and caused the mess. We decided that we needed to catch the troll so that this didn’t happen again. In groups, we used different materials to create troll traps. Once we made our trolls traps we decided to use this for the subject of our shared story writing. Our whole clan worked together to plan and write a story about ‘The Naughty Troll’. We made sure that we followed the correct structure of a story which we had learnt about earlier in the week. We also edited our story as we went along, changing words to make our story more interesting. We wrote a fantastic story together. We have shared it here to let you enjoy it too.
What has happened in Tay Clan?
This week, we have been learning how to structure a narrative text in writing. We have learned that a narrative text should have: a title, an orientation, a complication and a resolution.
Across this week, we have engaged in different activities to help us learn the structure of a story. We played a jigsaw game, where we all got a different part of the text. We had to match up and make a complete story. Miss Redmond was proud of how quickly Tay clan managed this! We have been applying this into our reading where we have had to describe and predict the plot of our reading book.
Today, Tay clan arrived into the classroom to find all the laptops on the tables with the words: Game Over. Tay received an email from Mrs Blair to let them know she had found the laptops like this when she arrived at school and found Miss Christie’s car in the car park. As a clan, we decided to plan and write our own narrative story about what had happened here at Calderwood. We created a box-up plan describing the setting, characters and language features we would include in our story.
As we were writing our story, we did a checklist to make sure that the 4 main parts of the structure were included. Tay clan will now be able to use this story example to help them plan and write their own narrative texts next week.
The investigation of this event today still continues. Why did the laptops say game over? We have added the orientation of our story for you to read:
It was a dark and gloomy morning in Calderwood. Miss Christie had forgotten her pass and was locked in Calderwood Primary School. She tried to call for help but there was no signal. It was 3 o’clock in the morning and the lights were flickering on and off, and no one was in sight.
Miss Christie tip-toed nervously up to Tay clan and got out her laptop. She went on to Teams to try and call the other champions in the school. However, no one answered.
Term 4 in the Bens
Last term, to begin our celebration of British Science Week 2022, the Ben Clans created a STEM takeover for each Clan in our school! The groups created a variety of lessons to deliver to the younger clans. Tay Clan learned about the skeleton, Rannoch Clan learned all about space and our solar system, Ness created scrap robots and used a sphero to move the robot, Bluebell Clan looked at the layers of the Earth and Bramble focussed on food chains in our oceans. Mull, Shetland and Orkney developed an understanding of space, star constellations and the universe.
The experience generated a lot of discussion around earth, space and the universe, informing the direction of learning for this term.
Our cross curricular topic this term is science based and will be looking at the origins of life and the habitability of earth and other planets. We began this week by watching a short clip narrated by David Attenborough about the tree of life and then researched the evolution of a penguin, inputting our research onto Padlet. Please click here to see our research.
Alongside this, we will also began understanding the different viewpoints offered in the creation stories from different world religions. We started this week with the Christian creation story and began to understand that there are similarities with that and the creation story in Judaism. We created our own versions of the Judeo-Christian creation story using powerpoint, imovies including greenscreen and SWAY.
Literacy
We are beginning to learn about the features and structure of narrative writing. We have been exploring our reading books to develop our understanding of the orientation, complication and resolution found within this genre of text. This week, we had a go at writing a narrative based around a theme of racing. We looked at a good example and deconstructed it so we could understand how to write one ourselves. One of the Bens wrote a story called ‘The Horse Race’. It is a good example as it has a clear orientation stating who, when and where; the complication is clear and includes direct speech and accurate punctuation and the resolution explains what happens and solves the problem, bringing the story to a conclusion.
We are excited about the term ahead and look forward to sharing with you soon. Watch this space!!
The Bens 🙂
Ness Clan’s Bird Boxes
Ness Clan have been honing their design skills and learning all about the birds around Calderwood in Taylor Wimpey’s bird box competition. Find out more about what we have been up to in our fabulous SWAY here:
Ben Lomond P7 Transition Meeting
Email for Ben Lomond
Dear parent/ carer,
As your child is in P7 next session we would like to invite you to a meeting with myself and the Depute Head Teacher of West Calder High (our cluster high school) to discuss what transition opportunities there will be for your child in Primary 7. The meeting will be held in Calderwood Primary in the Arena (please bring along a mask) on 25th May at 6:30pm.
Kind regards,
Miss Burton
Calderwood Tours – Ben Lawers/Ben Lomond
We have a winner!
We are extremely proud to announce that an invention created by a child from Ness Clan won the East of Scotland for their age category. Their invention, The Automatic Pencil, will be displayed at the University of Edinburgh Exhibition on 18th May and they will also recieve their certificate and trophy at an Award Ceremony later that day.
We had a huge number of entries of an extremely high standard so all children involved in the If you were an engineer what would you do? competition should be extremely proud of themselves. A special thanks also goes to Mr Clarke (Calderwood Parent) for giving the children in Ness, Rannoch and Tay Clans inspiration to begin inventing through presenting to the clans on the topic of his STEM career.
If you would like to find out more about this award please click here.
