Today during Junior Leadership time, the Technical Troopers and Pupil Council had a meeting to look at a Bring Your Own Device Contract. In groups we brainstormed all the ways we needed to behave in order to be responsible and respectful, if could bring our devices to school.
Watch this space!
Over the past four weeks the children at the P1-3 ICT club have been learning from each other to:
– Program Beebot to travel along paths and mazes
– Use the paint tool in Purple Mash
– Access Sumdog
– Explore apps on our new IPads.
We have all learned new ICT skills as well as develop our communication and problem-solving skills whilst having great fun.
 
This afternoon, P4, P5/4 and P5 were lucky enough to have a second visitor to come and help them with their IDL topic, Grand Designs. Mrs Deerness, the school’s Business Manager, spoke to the middle area about her job of helping Mid Calder Primary to make the most of our school budget from West Lothian Council. We learnt all about council tax and what this is used for, how much money our school is given to spend each financial year and what this might be spent on. Mrs Deerness even told us how much money is given to spend on each individual pupil in the school, which made us appreciate all of the resources we have even more! We asked lots of thoughtful questions to deepen our understanding about budgets and finance.
A big thank you to Mrs Deerness for coming in to speak to us. We know that this knowledge of budgeting will help us when we are making the tough decisions in our classroom designs.
Last week we had our first House meeting of 2016 and the House and Vice Captains decided the focus should be on Anytime Anywhere Learning (AAL), Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and internet safety, as these are currently hot topics of conversations in our school.
As usual we started the meeting going over the plan for the meeting and expectations. Then the house members took part in a community builder. The House and Vice Captains showed us a video about internet safety as it is Internet Safety Day soon.
This led on to telling us about Bring Your Own Device, this is something the Technical Troopers and Pupil Council are leading. We had to create a post-it pledge to show how we would follow our school values of responsible and respectful if we became a BYOD school. The House and Vice Captains have taken these post-its and created a school crest.
Thank you to the House and Vice Captains, and P7s for organising such an interesting house meeting.
http://www.slideshare.net/midcps/house-meeting-3
Primary 6 are continuing to make good progress in learning this term.
We have well and truly begun our historical investigations into our Scottish roots: focusing on WHO the Jacobites were, WHEN in history they were living and WHERE they could be located within Scotland and abroad. Â We have time lined the Stuart family tree to understand where the word “Jacobite” comes from and are beginning to build up information about Scottish clans and their influence on the Jacobites. Â When the weather improves, we are looking forward to heading outside to continue our investigations into battle tactics, Jacobite soldier formation and increase our familiarity with the infamous Redcoats.
We are looking forward to getting to grips with Guided Reading in our classroom, delving into the wonderful world of texts, whilst developing our reading skills. Â We have been developing our understanding of the layout, structure and contents of factual report writing. Â We continue to up-level our work to ensure it is to the highest quality.
As part of our classroom community work, we are beginning to examine Growth Mindsets to develop our learning power. Â We look forward to increasing our independence, our resilience and our perseverance within school and out, developing our future working and life skills.
Mrs Ross
On Thursday some of our Pupil Council and Technical Troopers took part in a Glow Meet with some pupils from Williamston Primary School. Some classes at Williamston Primary already use Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), so we decided we would ask them some questions about their journey, including the benefits of BYOD and how they resolved any issues they came across. A big thank you to the P6s who gave gave some of their lunch time to meet with us, we have lots to think about.
LI. We are learning what a knight was and what they did in medieval times
SC. I know what a knight was and what they did in medieval times.
![IMG_0259[1]](https://blogs.glowscotland.org.uk/wl/public/mcps/uploads/sites/2949/2016/01/IMG_02591.jpg)
![IMG_0260[1]](https://blogs.glowscotland.org.uk/wl/public/mcps/uploads/sites/2949/2016/01/IMG_02601.jpg)
This week as part of our interdisciplinary learning Primary Two have been learning all about knights. We learnt that knights had to protect the king and the king gave the knights land to live on. Knights were quite rich people and they had their own horse and armour. We then made some super pictures of knights. We first had to design a shield for our knight then we used tin foil for the armour.
Mr Nelson.
This afternoon, the middle area were lucky enough to have a special visitor to come and help them with their IDL context, Grand Designs. Mr Cargill, the Depute Headteacher at West Calder High School, came to share some wisdom and words of advice based on his experiences of being involved in the design of the new high school. He discussed the budget for the school, how some of the money might be spent, and how he knows that tough budgeting decisions will have to be made based on what’s best for the learners and staff in the school. He also shared the questions that those involved in this process have been asking themselves, some of which were the questions we have been asking during our own design challenge. We also learned about the different places Mr Cargill has gone to find ideas to help him. He even travelled as far as Liverpool to visit a newly built school, speak to those who now learn and work in the school, and to take pictures to remember ideas that he liked. Although we might not make it to England to  get some great ideas, we were certainly inspired by the creative layouts and designs he showed us.
A big thank you to Mr Cargill for sharing his experiences. We can’t wait to use what we have learned in our classroom designs and to share our finished designs with him!
Today at our Pupil Council meeting we discussed the concerns we had about bring our own device and came up with some solutions.
On Thursday some of the Pupil Council and Technical Troopers are having a Glow Meet with the Pupil Council at Williamston Primary. They are using BYOD and we think we could learn lots of them.
Our new school devices are almost ready to use on our Anytime Anywhere Learning network … We are very excited abut the possibilities this will have for us and our teachers!
Our new topic Grand Designs involves all the children in using maths skills to solve a series of design challenges.
During the past week the children have worked together to measure the contents of our classroom in centimetres and metres. This has involved choosing the correct tools for measuring.
A tricky challenge was working out the area of our classroom using square metres. The children worked together to make a series of metre squares, which they then laid down on the floor and counted so that we could find out the area of our classroom. This proved to be quite a tricky challenge to solve, especially as the squares had to be a metre all the way round.
