Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is an initiative offered across all West Lothian schools to give children the opportunity to safely use their own devices in school.
At all times, children will also have access to school devices such as netbooks and iPads, this is an opt in programme.
Please watch the video below that the children have made. If you would like your child to take part, please read and complete the contract with them. This will start on 19th October. 2021.
Shetland Clan have said goodbye to East Calder Primary and are ready for their new adventure in Calderwood! Over the past five weeks we have learnt new things, made lots of new friends and explored different situations in our play. Most importantly, we have had great fun doing it! We are so excited to continue our adventure in our new school.
As part of our transition into our new school, during writing, Shetland Clan drew themselves in Calderwood. We developed our understanding of how to share feelings and ideas through pictures. We focussed on adding detail to our pictures, ensuring what we drew was relevant and specific. Some of us even labelled the different parts of our picture. We also discussed the use of capital letters, full stops and finger spaces during this. With support, Shetland Clan even wrote a sentence about their drawing (and added their own title)! Miss Greig was very impressed with their determination and focus.
As I’m sure you can see from these drawings, our Clan can’t wait to be in Calderwood together. We have had a very successful start to the school year in East Calder and are ready for our new and exciting adventure in Calderwood.
Thank you for your commitment and continued support,
Miss Greig and Shetland Clan
At has been a busy week for Mull Clan. Some of our highlights included learning about our pencil grip with the help of Ally the Alligator. All of our pupils worked so hard to practise this, as it can feel a bit tricky and unusual to start with. We used this little video to help us if you want to watch it again at home and keep on practising https://video.link/w/2WF9c
We have also looked at what it means to be healthy. Mrs Robertson scribed pupil ideas where they then tried really hard to copy the words onto their own work. Mrs Robertson was very impressed with their focus and determination. We discussed the use of finger spaces and full stops as we constructed our sentences.
Mull continue to explore our Letterland characters. We have met all of the lowercase characters and sounds. We have started to investigate how these letters are formed. Once we return after the September break we will look at each character in more detail.
We are really looking forward to seeing our new school and exploring all of the new play opportunities.
Have a restful September break.
Wow! I can’t believe that’s us five weeks in already and it was our last day at East Calder Primary School today. We have such an exciting few weeks coming up as we will be settling into our new school building and classroom. For this blog Orkney would love to share our learning in numeracy with you.
We have been practising our number recognition, number formation and counting skills. The children have enjoyed learning outdoors, playing smartboard games and engaging with various number activities. We went outdoors and used chalk to make games of hopscotch. Orkney Clan had so much fun practising their number formations and hopping! I was very impressed. We have also been practising subitizing by looking at dot patterns. This is where the children try to identify the number of dots in a set by quickly looking at them. They are very good at being able to discuss the different ways that they noticed the dots too. If you want to practise at home, dominoes are brilliant for this.
Orkney Clan are going to continue to develop these skills in numeracy because it will help them with their understanding of number. They have been very engaged and I am so proud of what they have managed to achieve so far.
I hope you all enjoy your well-deserved September break.
Thank you for your continued support,
Miss Cunningham
Learning Intention: I can use adjectives to describe a setting.
This week as part of our Invisible string topic, Bluebell clan choose a destination they would most love to visit. With a partner, we researched our chosen destination on the netbooks looking at real life photographs.
Within our Calderwood Communicates lesson, we identified what an adjective is and used lots of different adjectives to describe what we might see and hear at our destination. Bluebell Clan thought of lots of amazing adjectives such as:
We then wrote a postcard to someone we are connected to and including adjectives to describe our destination.
Hope you have a lovely September break and looking forward to seeing you all on Wednesday in our new Calderwood school.
It was with a little sadness we said goodbye to our (rather small) classroom at Mid Calder.
We started the day with a reflection activity called “Head, Heart, Bin, Bag” where we talked and wrote about:
Lots of us are bringing our maturity, leadership skills and our responsible qualities!
As part of our Invisible String topic, we looked at how we are all connected to each other. We found out we’re connected through our likes, dislikes, interests, friends, families and values.
We also wrote a beautiful piece of personal writing about who our strings are connected to. We got to write a personal recount about a time when we were apart from someone we loved. We included lots of feelings and emotions words to describe how that felt and discussed ways that help us when we have difficult emotions.
We also had a lot of fun creating art pieces in the outdoors. Each group worked together to create a picture that showed their feelings. I think the apple face is happy!
Mrs Clarkson and Miss Watt have been teaching us different games that help our logic, problem solving and thinking skills. Cards, dominoes, draughts and ‘9 man morris’ are the ones we’re the most competitive with!
We ended our week with a little Friday party and can’t wait to begin our adventure at Calderwood!
