Calderwood Chronicle Nursery – 1 – 29/8/22
Please see below our first edition of the Calderwood Chronicle
First Week Back – Bluebell
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?
Thistle – Back to school
We are BACK!!
We have spent the last few week settling back in to our new clan with our new champions and clan members. To start off we had the task of designing our own learning space. We wanted a quiet space and lots of flexible seating, an art area, a construction area and space to go and work outwith the clan. We have enjoyed reconnecting with each other during our ‘stag start’ in the morning, playing games, being creative and building with lego. Some of us even experimented with robotics and creating circuits with some engineering sets.
We reflected on last years learning and discussed what we’d like to learn over the course of the year. One of the things we all decided that we wanted to carry over was our ‘Recognition Board’. We voted that it should have a dinosaur theme. Everyone created their own dinosaur themed character for our wall display and we have been using it this week. Lots of people were recognised for ‘listening respectfully to each other and waiting our turn to speak’.
We are looking forward to our year in Thistle and have lots of exciting opportunities coming our way.
The Ben’s Values
The Ben’s have been learning about values that are important to them. In class they were given a big list of values in which they were to narrow these down to their top 15, then their top 10. Once these values were narrowed down, pupils put them into a core value matrix. These top 10 values were drawn against one another to decide which one was more favourable. The values were narrowed down to their top 6. The Ben’s then had the creative freedom to decide how to represent these 6 core values. Some of the ideas include; poster, paintings, videos, PowerPoints and poems. This then led to creating their class charter in which they decided between them the top 6 values for the class. Pupils had the opportunity to see each others work and look at the creative ideas in the clan. Pupil’s have the opportunity to discuss their ideas at home.
Our Clan is a Family – Bramble
Our Clan is a Family
Over the last 2 weeks, Bramble Clan have been learning more about each other and have welcomed new children into our clan family. Together we read ‘Our Class is a family’ and discussed that, during school days, we work and play together as a family.
One of our favourite activities was creating our class portraits. First of all, we designed our own set of sunglasses and inside the sunglasses we wrote and drew about what we did in our Summer holidays. Next, we followed a step by step guide on how to draw our self-portrait. We had to look closely at the details of our faces to make sure we drew our portraits as close to real-life as possible. Finally, we designed and created a t-shirt to go with our portraits. In our t-shirt we drew and wrote all about ourselves including our favourite hobbies, family, favourite place in the world, favourite subject in school and 3 words to describe ourselves. We have displayed our ‘family’ portraits in our clan room. During our clan chat we were able to share our portraits with each other and learn more about each other.
We have discussed what we wanted to include in our clan room and have included a calm area with lovely, soft cushions and calming items to help us relax. We have also begun to develop our library area with a selection of books and some magazines to explore and we will continue to develop this area to support us in our literacy learning. We have enjoyed using these areas during DEAR (Drop Everything and Read) time.
We discussed our daily routines and jobs for in school and in our clan room. We know that our clan family need to work together to make sure our day runs smoothly and that we all take responsibility for the different jobs that need to be done for the day. We have been working together as a great team already!
Our final task, this week, was to look at developing and designing our clan charter. We looked at a list of children’s rights and decided on those that are most important to us in the classroom. Through this learning, we have decided on a list of rules and expectations to make sure that we respect these rights for ourselves and each other and have designed our clan charter which will be displayed in our Clan room.
It has been a fantastic two weeks and we have settled well into our new clan family.
Nursery Champions 2022/2023
Calderwood Chronicle 1: 26/08/22
Capturing Calderwood: First Week August 2022
P4-7 Guidance for Glow
We would request that if children have access to a phone or tablet they download the following free apps to support with learning through glow:
- Microsoft Teams – This is their online classroom.
- Microsoft One Drive – This enables the children to save work to upload to their team. It also allows them to access their documents at home and school.
- Microsoft Word
- Microsoft One Note
- Microsoft Powerpoint
Downloading Microsoft Apps and Logging in for the First Time
The instructions on the link below will show you how to log into the apps.
To download Microsoft Office 2016 from the Glow Application Library, search for the ‘Office 365’ tile, shown here. It can be found on the National (Scotland) Launch Pad or you can add it to your own Launch Pad. Further help on the App Library is available here.
To download the software to a PC or Mac, click on the Office 365 tile and follow the instructions. More information from Microsoft is available here.
If you are downloading to an iPad or iPhone, you will need to download the apps from the App Store then log in using your Glow username. More information from Microsoft is available here.
It is also possible to download the apps from within Microsoft O365. To do so, click on the Office 365 link in the top left of your screen. This will take you to the O365 home page. Click on ‘Install Office 2016’ and follow the instructions.
Entering your username
When logging in, you will be asked to enter your username – this is your Glow username plus the domain e.g. gw15examplejames@glow.sch.uk. You will then be transferred to the Glow login screen.
Once you have entered your login details here, your registration will be complete. The Glow username will only activate the software for as long as that account is active in Glow.
Saving their work using an app
When using an app such as word or powerpoint, children should save their work to one drive.
When uploading their work to a team:
- Within a post
- Click the paperclip icon
- Search in their one drive folder
- Click on the document
- You will see it upload
Saving their work using a netbook/ laptop
When using an app such as word or powerpoint, children can save their work to one drive/ or the computer.
When uploading their work to a team:
- Click on files
- Click on a folder
- Click on upload
- Search in their one drive folder/ or the computer
- Click on the document
- You will see it upload
