East Calder Primary School Blog

Coming Soon!.. The wonderful Travelling Book Fair

We are pleased to welcome the Travelling Book Fair back to East Calder Primary.

The Book Fair offers a wide range of affordable books for all ages. It helps us to promote and encourage a love of books and reading for enjoyment. It also allows us to fund raise to buy more books for our school.

The Book Fair will coincide with Parent Appointments next week.

Opening Times

Wednesday 8th Oct 5-7.45pm

Thursday 9th Oct 4-6pm

And also Friday -12.15 until 1pm.

Please be aware we CANNOT ACCEPT ANY CASH payments and books are ordered and paid for digitally using a QR code.

Some popular titles may need to be ordered and will be delivered to the school on Wednesday 15th October.

Happy reading everyone!

Primary 2A

We have been working so hard in P2A. We have been continuing to use addition strategies in Numeracy. We use concrete tools to make calculations and then write the algorithm. We have also been learning to use a counting on strategy. This amazing learner is using cubes to partition 20. He made 11 + 9 = 20 and 10 + 10 = 20.

We love challenging ourselves to add using higher numbers. We are also developing mental strategies. We use ICT to enhance our learning and Miss Marra is supporting us to ask each other questions. For example:

Why do you think that?

What do you think of _________’s answer?

How could you show this another way?

What do you notice? What do you wonder?

We apply questioning across other areas of the curriculum to enhance our learning.

In Literacy, we are learning to peer-assess our Writing. We are learning to write a description this term. We love reading our writing to the class and then we give feedback linked with our co-created Success Criteria. We are becoming experts at noticing punctuation and identifying next steps.

We have been working hard in Reading and we are developing comprehension skills using Reciprocal Reading strategies. We are focusing on prediction this term and we have a Percy the Predictor puppet to support us with our learning. We take part in echo reading as a class. We read a text on the board using Epic. We love having the opportunity to lead echo reading for our peers.

We are learning to write sentences in Grammar and this helps us to improve our writing. We work independently or in pairs to write sentences with accurate punctuation. We enjoy correcting sentences and sharing our own sentences with each other. We write in our jotters and we sometimes write on our desks with white board pens.

Article 29: We have the right to develop our talents and abilities.

Article 12: We have the right to be heard.

P1a – Maths Week

P1a had an exciting time during Maths Week, filled with outdoor learning and creative exploration. We practised our counting skills by chasing and popping bubbles, turning a fun activity into a great way to build number sense. Using natural materials like sticks and stones, we created counting collections and carefully ordered them by size, developing our understanding of measurement and comparison.

Our 2D shape hunt around the playground was a big hit! We discovered circles, rectangles, squares, and even spotted a triangle and a pentagon. Suddenly, shapes were everywhere — in the classroom, around the school, and in everyday objects. We captured our discoveries with photos and used them to inspire our own shape pictures, combining maths with creativity.

It was a fantastic week of learning, exploring, and having fun with maths in the environment.

Congratulations also to our fantastic pupil who recently walked 5 miles for charity in the Edinburgh Kilt Walk. A tremendous achievement. Well done!

Math Week in P3A

As part of Maths Week Scotland, we engaged in a wide range of activities designed to make learning fun and meaningful. Pupils participated in the Sumdog Competition, created pictures using a variety of shapes, and designed hundreds square art pieces. They also explored construction by building shapes with magnetic cubes and used star shapes in the tuff tray to build, create pictures, and sort by colour. In addition, pupils experimented with 3D shapes and developed pattern-making skills using the drill set. It was a week full of rich learning experiences through play.

Maths week in Primary 1C

This week, our young mathematicians took their learning outdoors and explored numbers, shapes, and patterns in creative and playful ways. We collected natural materials and used them to compare sizes, order objects, and make discoveries about measurement and classification. We also had lots of fun clapping and counting bubbles as they floated through the air—an exciting way to practise number skills and develop coordination!

Indoors, we used 2D shapes to create beautiful artwork and repeating patterns, combining maths with creativity. A fantastic week of hands-on learning, curiosity, and exploration!

P3A Learning

We discussed our school rules and what they mean for us. To show our agreement of keeping to the rules – Ready, Respect, Safe we created our superhero selves. Look carefully and you may even see a Super Teacher!!

We have started off the year well and to help us we have been playing different listening games. We are remembering that at East Calder Primary we show respect by listening. This looks like sitting still, looking at the person who is talking, listening to all the words, following instructions, staying quiet when someone is talking and using kind words to reply.

We have been learning about place value using hundreds, tens, and ones. We had to use them to create a place value monster then work out what its number was. We also cut and stuck a paper copy in our jotters. A very fun way to learn!!

We have been learning to find and use adjectives in sentences. We worked together to highlight adjectives in a passage and have started writing our own descriptions following PM Writing Scheme. So far we have written about Lions and elephants.

We are learning to develop our knowledge of telling the time. We have worked on o’clock, half past, quarter past and some of us are beginning to use quarter to. We are learning to swap between analogue and digital. We made these clocks to help us in our learning.

Primary 2A

We have had a great start to the year in P2A. We love our new classroom and we have enjoyed seeing our old friends from P1. We have also enjoyed making some new friends and becoming a fantastic team as one class.

Here are a few pictures of our classroom. Article 24: We have the right to a safe and clean environment.

We have been settling into our new routines and we have been working hard on our learning. In Writing, we are learning to write a description. We have learned about what a description is we are learning about how to structure our writing. We are working hard to practise writing sentences with capital letters, finger spaces and full stops. We have been doing really well so far and we wrote a description about one of our puppets “Gerard the Giraffe” in Week 2. We are all very proud of ourselves.

Here is Rosie’s fantastic description. She worked very hard on her punctuation and wrote independently. We all peer-assess her writing together to give her feedback.

Article 29: We have the right to develop our talents and abilities.

In Numeracy, we are learning about Place Value and we have been working hard to order numbers and talk about the digits in a number. We have also started learning addition to 20. We have been learning to write the calculations and use our Numeracy Tools to make them. We love sharing our strategies. Some of us are adding even higher numbers to challenge ourselves.

Primary 1C

We are off to a flying start in Primary 1C, we have been practising our new sounds and number writing. We have been showcasing our creativity using technologies and other tools like PlayDoh to help us with our counting and 1:1 correspondence. As a class, we have loved exploring our class story ‘The Smeds and The Smoos’ by Julia Donaldson. This book and context supports kindness and sharing, a skill we are developing. Please have a look at some of our work below: