Calderwood Tours

Last week we finally opened our doors to our families and our children proudly showed their parents and carers our new Calderwood home! We were all very excited.

Thank you to our tour guides in Primary 4-6 who helped to support the event.

Some of the feedback we received included:

  • It was so lovely to finally see inside the school. The classrooms all look fantastic. Loved seeing their work. What such a lovely and inspiring workspace you have.
  • It felt so good to finally be able to see where the children learn and have fun. I love the open plan classrooms far less daunting and restricting for the children. It was great to see some of the things they are learning and some of their art/work on display.
  • Highlight – seeing the excitement on my kids faces as they personally showed mum and dad round. Use of space – I felt everywhere looked welcoming and interesting with lots of different tools for play and learning. Wow – so bright and airy with amazing views from the huge windows.
  • Highlight was seeing my kids brimming with enthusiasm showing us their learning spaces and favourite areas. My son saying, ‘Wait until you see this!’ every time we turned a corner! We loved all of the break-out areas and the fact that the spaces all flow together. Wow – the discovery area upstairs and the inspirational quote above the gym hall. This is no ordinary school! We all came away saying how lucky the children are to have a school like this. It’s easy to see why they are so enthusiastic about going to school!
  • Highlight was seeing my daughters class space and her tray and peg and some of the things with her name up on the wall. Made me quite emotional! I loved the STEM space and that there was a dedicated area for this for the children to share. I think its good they will all be able to see each other using this space and the extra room to be creative outwith their classroom allows them to concentrate on the stem learning activities and some independence from their teacher. All the spaces the champions and children have created looked great, especially that castle! They weren’t all the same which showed the champions have worked with their own clans thoughts and ideas, which is great.
  • It was lovely to finally see the school from inside. What a great design and how lucky are the kids who are learning in this amazing set up. My highlight is definitely the discovery den and Stem room. Would love to see kids learning in these areas. It was good to see the breakout rooms and area where my kid explained that they sometimes get together with champions to study together with other clans or in separate groups within the clan. Which I was quite impressed of as they not only get to do group study but also are given Individual attention by Champions. My wow moment was when I saw the Clan names above each classroom. As I could connect with not only my kids clan and their achievements but could also relate all the achievement communication we have received so far with regards to each clan. Definitely a dream come true for a parent.
  • Really impressed by our tour guides so there so polite and confident! School is just amazing, we feel so lucky! It really felt from the layout of the rooms to the activities on offer that each child will have a chance to explore different interests and develop their skills be that arts or sciences.

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.

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Categorized as Tay

Bens do ABC… AstroBiology @ Calderwood

While we were looking at the creation stories through the religious context, we also explored the scientific timeline of events leading to how life is today. Very interesting discussions ensued comparing and contrasting different explanations of the creation of the universe.

Below are the completed research challenges displaying learning from this. The paintings were created following a lesson on using watercolour as a medium for creating paintings.

Following our previous learning, we have built on this to explore how life develops on earth and the likelihood of finding other living beings in our solar system. We look at how we detect life on earth and linked this to our ‘Internet of Things’ learning through analysing data we have collected; Lux (light); Degrees (temperature); humidity and CO2 level.

 

 

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