Category: Clan News

Calderwood Goes Planting!

Today all the Clans had the opportunity to get outdoors, braving the rain, and plant bulbs. We were really excited to spend time with different Clans – Ben Lawers and Ben Lomond should be so proud of the support they gave to younger children in our community.

We did this to play our part in the nationwide Edina Bulb Project – you can find out a little more about this by clicking here. We were really excited to explore our learning about the needs of a plant even further and cannot wait to see these bulbs begin to sprout in spring!

Mull October Update

In Mull, we have been continuing to explore and practise our letter and number formations. This week, we have focused on a and 4.
With our letter ‘a’ we have practised the formation and investigated the short and long vowel sounds. The short ‘a’ appearing in words such as: ant, apple, alligator where as the long ‘a’ sound appears in: apron, angel, ace. It can be tricky to get our heads around this but this helps build those initial literacy foundations which will be built on.

We have also investigated the number 4. We practised how to form the number 4 and had our friends choose our best formation. We also learned all about collecting and counting groups of 4 item. We noticed that on our number 4 hunt, the number can appear a little bit different, sometimes it looks more like a triangle shape. We also noticed the written word for 4 FOUR and what a 4 looked like on a dot pattern or on a tens frame. Starting to build on to our number bonds and knowledge of addition, we used our bunny ears to show different ways of making a 4. This may be 3 fingers on one bunny ear and 1 finger on another bunny ear or using double 2.

Sparking some curiosity this week was the item in our curiosity box. Lots of questions posed:
What is it?
How does it feel?
Where does it come from?
It must be from a hot country because it is so big!
How heavy is it?
Is it a cucumber?
Can you eat it?

The item was a gigantic courgette that Mrs Robertson grew in her garden. It was the only piece of veg in her vegetable patch that wasn’t eating by the wild bunny rabbits.

We are really looking forward to our Halloween themed week next week with some extra special spooky learning!

Bring Your Own Device – Ben Lawers & Ben Lomond

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.

 

Into Calderwood – Shetland Clan in Calderwood

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

 

 

 

Mull’s last week at East Calder P.S

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.

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Categorized as Mull

Orkney Clan’s Numeracy

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

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