Calderwood Primary and Nursery

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

Opening Day Reminders

Dear parent/ carer,

The excitement is building in our champion team as our opening day is almost here!

We have made two videos to celebrate the end of our chapter and the start of a new one that we would love you to share with your child:

https://vimeo.com/610028403

https://vimeo.com/608790877

Can I please make two pleas to help us ensure that Wednesday goes to plan:

Please try to have your child at school on time.
I fully understand that is very tempting to wait around on Wednesday morning to see the red carpet entrance but you will recognise that schools are still following some Covid restrictions, which includes no gathering at the school gates. Can I please request that you keep the walkway from the playground gate at the car park entrance (Glencoe entrance) to the school entrance clear, as the children will walk along there to enter the building. We are recording the event and taking photos.

A reminder that everything you need to know is here: https://sway.office.com/nHvvCqDBstrI4JRs

Our office phone number is: 01506 280060.

I look forward to seeing our children on Wednesday.

Kind regards,

Miss Burton

In Calderwood: Calderwood Champions

Goodbye to Chapter One of Calderwood Primary

In Calderwood: Transition Arrangements

Dear parent/ carer,

Please find below a link to our updated Sway detailing everything you need to know about our move into Calderwood Primary.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the staff at East Calder Primary and Mid Calder Primary for making us feel so welcome and supporting us with the first part of our Calderwood journey.

We are all very excited about our first week ‘In Calderwood’, creating and sharing this moment in history together.

Have a lovely September weekend and we look forward to welcoming all our children into our new school on Wednesday.

Kind regards,

Miss Burton

Social Stories: In Calderwood

Please see below social stories to help your child with the transition

Mull social story

Orkney social story

Shetland social story

Bluebell social story

Ben Lawers social story

Ben Lomond social story

Toilet social story

Hand dryer Social Story

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.

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

Invisible String Adventure

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:

Deep blue sea
Crunchy leaves
Birds twitting
Splashing waterfall

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.

Ben Lawers & Ben Lomond’s Last Week at Mid Calder!

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:

Head- what we learned about ourselves
Heart- what we loved the most
Bin- what we wanted to leave behind
Bag- what we were bringing with us to Calderwood!

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!