Calderwood Primary and Nursery

Calderwood Magic Miles – Parent Council Fundraiser

Our Parent Council have organised the fundraiser below for nursery and primary children, which we are very excited about!

Sponsorship forms will be sent home with children next week.

Languagenut West Lothian Competition

Languagenut are running a competition for West Lothian and we would love for all of Calderwood to get involved! This competition will run from the 1^st until 31^st March. The pupils can compete in this competition at home and in school. They should login to their Languagenut at home and complete different tasks to help them extend their language vocabulary. The pupils should complete any home learning tasks that have been set for them and have the choice to select any other tasks they wish to complete. They will receive points for each activity that they finish. We can’t wait to see you using Languagenut at home and helping Calderwood earn points in West Lothian’s Competition!

Tay Clan’s Hot Report Writing

Over the last few weeks, Tay clan have been learning how to write an information report. This week we have been doing hot writing which is when we show everything that we have learned about reports. The context for our writing was castles. This is something we had learned about through STEM. We had to make sure we were using our writing toolkit by including: sub-headings, photographs with captions, evaluation, labelled diagrams, description paragraphs, title, general statement, topic words, adjectives, proper nouns, common nouns and verbs. We even tried to challenge ourselves by using a ‘did you know?’ fact.

In our reports, we described the different parts of a castle, what it was like to live in a castle, what a castle is, who lives in a castle and why, and what does a castle look like.

We can self-assess our writing using the writing toolkit. This will allow us to check that we have everything that we need to make a fantastic report. Miss Redmond will also mark our writing using the report writing targets and share this with us.

At home, we can share what a report is with our families. We are going to ask family members at home if they need to write a report for their job, school, university or college. We are going to show them how they can structure their report and what they could include. Here are some examples of the writing we have created below:

Nursery Calderwood Chronicle Edition 7

Dear Parent/Carer,

Please see attached the latest edition of Calderwood Chronicle Edition 7.

Calderwood Chronicle 7 – 25_02_22

Chefs @ Calderwood

This week Rannoch Clan worked alongside Ness and Tay to begin our new IDL learning. First of all, we had a feel in Mrs Scobie’s big bag and described what we felt inside it, using interesting adjectives. Inside the bag were different cooking items and we learnt what we would use them for.

In the next few weeks we are going to learn about food and develop our culinary skills to become cooking champions and the finest chefs in Calderwood.

Our first task was to complete our chef ID cards. We watched a video and then afterwards reflected on the skills and qualities that a chef might have. We wrote our names and drew our faces on our own ID cards. We also wrote our favourite food and our current cooking skills.

We then wrote down 3 things that we would like to achieve and develop through our learning about food. Hopefully over the coming weeks we can get better at cooking and maybe help out at home.

West Lothian Sumdog Maths Contest: 11.3.22 – 17.3.22

Huge good luck to all our amazing Calderwood Primary School Children, they have now been entered into the West Lothian Sumdog Maths Contest! The contest will run between Friday 11th March and Thursday 17th March. Your child can access the competition by logging in via the following link and using their unique username and password along with the school code Calderwood2:

https://www.sumdog.com/user/sign_in

This competition is a fantastic way to compete against lots of other Primary students, have fun and develop numeracy/maths skills at the very same time. If your child has forgotten their details, please do get in touch with the school office as we’d be more than happy to assist.

A Week in the Life of the Bens

What fun we’ve had this week in Ben Lawers and Ben Lomond!

We have got inspired in our 2D-shape learning, by applying coding skills we honed earlier this year, to develop our understanding of the qualities and properties of shapes.

We also explored our creativity skills through a Community Art Project with Svetlana, a Community Art Champion. We used different mediums to create shapes inspired by water and leaves to create a powerful and dynamic finished piece.

For literacy we have been working hard on using Reflective Reading Strategies to help us develop our understanding of a text. We used the Point, Evidence, Explain (PEE) technique in reply to questions posed. This has encouraged us to look for answers hidden within and beyond the text, through a use of based quotes to back up our points.

First we had to fix our books shut with a Post-it Note, to ensure we weren’t getting any clues from the text. We had to use the information from the covers of the book to make a prediction about what we thought it was going to be about. We looked for clues in the illustrations, blurb and words from the title to complete our PEE answers.

After that, we had a chance to read our stories on our own or with a partner. Our next challenge was to use our clarifying skills to share our understanding of an interesting or important word or phrase. To do this, we used a thesaurus, an online dictionary or discussions with others in our clan. Here are some of the PEE answers we created. We know that we will continue to work on this skill and are looking forward to being able to create persuasive and detailed answers.