Clan News – Page 36 – Calderwood Primary and Nursery

Bookbug Week at Calderwood!

To celebrate Bookbug Week our younger children have been having fun with Mrs Shemilt at her Bookbug Sessions. They met Bookbug, sang songs, listened to stories and received their Bookbug Explorer Bags which are for 3 year olds.

Play in Primary 1 our Rationale

Please see below our rationale for Play-Based learning and teaching in Primary 1.

Play in Primary 1 at Calderwood

Rannoch Clan – Multiplication and Division

Rannoch clan have been learning about the different strategies we can use when multiplying and dividing such as making arrays, repeated addition/subtraction, skip counting and making equal groups.

This week, we explored the relationship between multiplication and division. We created arrays, using different items, to show multiplication calculations and learnt that if we swap the numbers round, we get the same answer. We explored even further and found that we could use the same array to find division facts. This led us to exploring fact families. We built arrays and found all the multiplication and division facts related to them and put these into our fact family houses.

We realised that a fact family is made up of 3 numbers and that we can solve division calculations if we know the related multiplication facts. This might help us to solve division calculations more quickly.

Bring Your Own Device- P4s Tay and Rannoch

At Calderwood, digital technologies is at the heart of our curriculum as we believe it is a fundamental tool for supporting learning and providing pupils with the skills for life, learning and work. Therefore, we would like to offer the Primary 4s from Tay and Rannoch the opportunity to participate in ‘Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)’, where the pupils are permitted to bring their own personal device in to school to support their learning in the classroom.

The P4s from Tay and Rannoch have been discussing BYOD at school by exploring the risks and benefits for their learning. The pupils and champions have collectively created a BYOD charter that highlights the rules and expectations of using your own device. The pupils have also created a video to further explain what BYOD is and to demonstrate the rules that must be followed. Please take some time to read the charter and video we have created with your child. The video can be accessed through this link:

If you would like your child to participate in the BYOD programme, please fill out the form below by Wednesday 18th May 2022. Please get in touch if you have any questions regarding the BYOD programme.

Measuring fun in Tay!

This week Tay clan have been learning how to measure length using metres, centimetres and millimetres. We discussed how when measuring length we are investigating how high, wide or long something is. We also explored a range of measuring tools we would have to use in our learning, such as: rulers, measuring tapes, metre sticks and trundle wheels.

As a starter to our lesson, we were set a challenge to find objects in our clan area that were 5mm, 30cm and 1m long. We managed to find lots of things in our clan and we were very surprised with how short 5mm actually is!

As a clan we were set a car race challenge. We had to build a ramp that would allow our racing cars to travel the furthest. We were able to select our own materials for making our ramp. We had to let our car go down the ramp, estimate how far it had travelled and then check our estimations using different measuring tools. Some of our cars travelled more than 4m long! Miss Redmond was also very impressed by our creativity in building the ramps.

Array Cities in Ness Clan

L.I. I am learning to create arrays and use them to find multiplication facts.

Ness Clan have been getting crafty this week, creating their own Array Cities! They enjoyed using different colours and shapes to create their buildings. They had to create equal rows of windows on each building, experimenting with different shapes and sizes. They counted the rows and columns to find multiplication facts. Some of Ness clan challenged themselves to find matching division facts to create fact families. They discussed their cities with one another.

Next steps: Building up their knowledge of different multiplication facts and beginning to use quick recall to mentally make these calculations.