We have been very busy in the Bluebell Clan getting to know each other and our Champion. We started the new term learning more about one another, discussing our summer adventures and participating in various ‘Getting to know you’ activities.

We showed Miss Ali how much we love arts and crafts by drawing our very own self-portraits. We drew illustrations of our summer adventures into our sunglasses and designed an ‘All about me’ t-shirt which shared our hobbies, favourite colour, favourite animals and likes and dislikes. This has been made into ‘Our Clan is our family’ display, inspired by a lovely book we read called ‘Our Class is our Family’.

After reading this book, we discussed how we are all connected and how we must make everyone feel welcome. We also discussed our role and responsibility within our clan rooms and came up with the following roles: milk monitors, cloakroom monitors, line leader, door holder, technology monitors and henry hoovers.

We came up with a minion themed recognition board and have been working very hard to get our minions onto the banana by meeting our Clan targets! We have been discussing noise levels in our Clan room as well as our relentless routines for indoor breaks/lunch, gym hall and our conga. We discussed how this should look, feel and sound like. We also created great teacher adverts and discussed what our clan members should look, feel and sound like. We have been learning about our rights and how this looks within our Clan room. From interesting discussion, we came up with our Seven rules for our Clan charter.

These are our rules:

1. Always be kind and friendly to each other.

2. Respect everyone and look after our clan property.

3. Play and learn safely.

4. Make everyone feel included in play and learning.

5. Respect everyone’s differences such as views and opinions.

6. Work towards our clan targets, individual targets, and achievements.

7. Learn from your mistakes!

In addition to all our hard work, we attended our very first Calderwood Connects for this term. We were very pleased that Mrs Grieve complimented us on how good our sitting and listening was during this assembly. As a reward, we played ‘Splat’ the following day and had lots of fun teaching Miss Ali how to play it!

This week we have also been doing a lot of team building activities such as creating our shields and designing our Clan flag. We also came up with our table group names and have designed our pupil charter. Our Clan voted for the ‘Bluebell theme’ and have had lots of fun creating our own Bluebells.

With Mrs Robertson we participated in the ‘Paperchain Challenge’ where we continued to work hard to develop our teamwork and problem solving skills. Our challenge involved creating the longest paperchain! We were able to identify the skills required to work effectively in a team and demonstrated this superbly. Teams were randomly generated and we enjoyed experiencing the skills and qualities of different classmates.  We are starting to introduce specific roles within teams that can help to promote positive teamwork and a range or skills development e.g. leadership, time keeping and organisation.

Once our challenge time was up, we had to consider the best way of working out the longest chain.  This learning experience took us outdoors to investigate the range of materials that could support our measuring.  Can you guess the longest paperchain…? 9m – well done to the winning team!

What other challenges will we face this year in Bluebell?