Year 1 - Let it snow...
See what Year 1 have been up to last week
Brrr – it has been a chilly week but in Year 1, we have been keeping ourselves warm with plenty of learning!
In maths, we have been building on our division skills by thinking about what fractions are (halves and quarters), and how we could find half or a quarter of a number. We discussed what would happen if we had to find half of a number that we couldn’t share equally and had some very creative answers! We used our fractions knowledge on Thursday to create a ‘Fair Feast’ with a partner, sharing food items in halves or quarters. Some children noticed that when they put two quarters together, they could make a half – the start of recognising equivalent fractions!
Next week, we will be learning about time, building on our previous knowledge of o’clock, and learning to read and make half past. We will be ordering events into chronological after, using the vocabulary of ‘before’, ‘after’, ‘earlier’ and ‘later’.
We are learning about non-fiction texts in English, in preparation for writing our own information about a fruit for our topic, ‘Go Bananas’. To develop our understanding and vocabulary, we enjoyed a tropical fruit tasting session on Tuesday, where the children sampled mango, pineapple, passion fruit, avocado, tangerine and many more! This stimulated some fantastic adjectives and similes, which we used later in the week for our writing. We also recapped on the rule for adding ‘s’ or ‘es’ to mark plural nouns.
We thought about where different fruits come from in Geography and plotted this on a world continents map which the children created themselves. We identified the hottest countries in the world, then added the equator line; the children then explored why the countries closest to the equator are the hottest.
In RE, we continued to learn about the importance of Passover for Jewish people and thought about which parts of the story of Moses are most significant for Jewish people at Passover. We used this to create a thought bubble to express our ideas.
On Wednesday and Thursday, we welcomed Warburtons, who came in to talk to the Year 1 children about healthy eating. We learned about the ‘Eat Well’ plate and the food groups important for health and growth. After washing our ‘baker’s hands’, we donned aprons and hairnets ready to make a healthy sandwich to take home.
In music, the children are learning ‘a’ and ‘b’, using them to start to play a variety of tunes.
As always, we continue with our phonics and reading daily.
Notes:
Reading books
Many thanks to Mrs Lowy and Mrs Faulkner who have been labelling our new books for the book band boxes. We hope to have them in circulation very soon!
Reading books and diaries
Some children are regularly forgetting to bring in their coloured band reading books and reading diaries each day. Whilst we understand that this make happen once or twice, children should have them in school every day so that we can move them through the book bands appropriately.
Spellings
A huge ‘thank you’ to everyone who helps their child practice their spellings at home. It is very pleasing to see how many children are scoring well (7 or more out of 10) in the spellings test on a Wednesday, but more importantly, using the spellings they have learnt in their writing.
To make learning spelling a little more fun, please see the ideas sheet below.
Home learning and Outcome
Thank you for the home learning already received! The date for it to be handed in is Friday 7th February.
We look forward to welcoming parents and carers to our fruity outcome on Thursday 14th February from 2.30pm.
Here are some ideas to make learning spellings a little more fun!
Make a Video - Use an iPad, tablet or phone to record your child spelling their words.
Bath Spelling - Use foam letters in the bath and stick onto the wall to make words.
Scrabble Spelling - use scrabble pieces to build words. For some sneaky math fun have child total the amount for each word.
Torch Words - Set up an Alphabet chart, turn out the lights and use a torch to shine on each letter (one letter at a time) to spell words.
Clothes pegs words - Write letters on clothes pegs and have child pin letters to make words. They can pin onto hanging string (think clothes line) or even an index card.
Flower Words - Draw a flower for each word, 1 petal for each letter of the word.
Cotton Bud Writing - Use cotton buds and paint to dot letters to spell the word or write the word using the cotton bud as a paint brush.
Build a Word with Lego - Using some tape, write the letters needed for each word ahead of time on some Lego bricks. Mix them up and then call out a word and have child(ren) build it using the appropriate bricks and you will end up with some spelling word towers.
Small/Medium/Large Words - Write the word using the smallest letters you can possibly write (this one is a favourite), then doing it normal sized and finally jumbo sized.
Shaving Cream - Make a thin layer of shaving cream on a tray and use a paintbrush or a fingertip to spell out the words.
Salt/Sand/Flour Tray - Spell words using finger or paintbrush
Paint It! - Use a paintbrush and paint to spell words.
Stamp It! - Use alphabet stamps and ink pads to stamp out words or let child use fingerprints to write words if you don't have letter stamps.
Rainbow Words - Spell words using different coloured markers or crayons for each letter.
Jumpin' Jack - do jumping jacks as you spell words - 1 jump per letter
Froggy Spelling - leap like a frog and spell words - 1 letter for each leap.
Swat & Spell - put letter cards on the floor and using a flyswatter, swat the letters in the order necessary to spell words.
Memory Game - Write 2 sets of words onto flashcards or paper and then play a Memory Game with them.
Mystery Letters - write words with missing letters. Child must figure out which mystery letters are missing in order to complete words.
Spelling BINGO - Make or print a few blank BINGO cards to use with spelling practice. Write spelling words in boxes and randomly call out (or use flashcards) words. Child should cover appropriate words when called. To make things extra challenging, write words spelled incorrectly in a few spaces as well so child has to discriminate between the correctly spelled words and the incorrect ones.
Wordsearch- you can visit sites like PuzzleMaker , type in your child's spelling list and create a word search that you can print. Then have your child search for the correctly spelled spelling words and circle them. Maybe they could make one of their own?
Which is Correct? - Write words on dry erase board and include misspelled words. Have child identify the correctly spelled words.
School improvement plan - update February 2019
An update from the school governors on the improvements and progress being made by the school
Dear Parents and Carers,
We are now six months on from our OFSTED inspection and the last Parent Survey. In the subsequent meetings I held with parents, I committed to provide periodic updates on how the school was doing and to give parents and carers the opportunity to discuss this.
I am pleased to report on behalf of the governing board that, whilst our improvement journey continues, we have seen significant progress and improvement since June 2017.
In summary, OFSTED asked us to improve by ensuring we strengthened leadership, brought consistency to behaviour management and strengthened teaching and learning. The governing board has put in several measures to ensure that this happens as quickly as possible, for the benefit of all of our children. We have also put in place some measures following your feedback from the parent survey.
By the end of the summer term, we had appointed a new interim leadership team led by Mr Johnson to start in September 2018. The team immediately set about improving behaviour management with the introduction of a new behaviour policy and merit cards. This, combined with the positive challenge the children are receiving in lessons, has meant that the low levels of disruption identified in the OFSTED report have significantly reduced. To address the small pockets of more challenging behaviour, the school has partnered with the Hampshire Primary Behaviour Service to get the best advice and training, and has recruited new experienced staff to work with pupils to help them get ‘Ready to Learn’. This facility will be available after February half term.
The team also introduced a new home learning policy to help to bring consistency on how and when homework was set, but also to ensure that the amount of homework per week was appropriate to the age of the child - this was one of the issues raised by parents and carers. We are continuing to review the implementation of this to ensure that it is working as intended and having the desired outcomes.
Mrs Greenwood took the lead as Special Educational Needs and Disability Co-ordinator (SENDCo). The processes used by the school were comprehensively reviewed and redrafted. Each child on the SEND register had their specific needs reviewed. Meetings were then held with parents to discuss the nature of the need and the provision for their child. A number of training and briefing sessions for staff were held during the term to ensure the provision for those children in class met their needs. The school also invested in new SEND screening tools to help accurately identify the needs and potential needs of pupils.
The autumn term also saw the external review of the school’s use of the Pupil Premium Grant (PPG) conducted by Hampshire County Council’s lead for PPG. As a result of this review, more focus has been put on ensuring the provision for children on the PPG register is clear in both the planning and delivery of lessons. There are ongoing external reviews across the year to ensure that the recommendations are having the desired impact on outcomes for our children.
Improvements in teaching and learning have been delivered through an enhanced process of lesson observation, feedback, coaching, training and development. Work to accurately assess each child to ensure that teachers know exactly what the pupils need to learn was undertaken. This helped to ensure that teaching could be more accurately and consistently matched to the needs of the children, and so accelerate their learning. This is an ongoing, continual process of improvement which is increasingly embedded in the teaching practice in our school.
The visibility of the leadership team has improved, with senior leaders spending time in the playground before school and holding parent meetings across a range of topics and issues since September.
The governing body recruited a very experienced educational professional in Mrs Taylor as our new Headteacher during the autumn term, and were very pleased to be able to secure a start date of 1st December 2018, ahead of plan and allowing for a comprehensive handover with Mr Johnson.
In Mrs Taylor’s own words, “My role is to bring some stability to the school, building on the improvements already underway. One of the differences that a permanent appointment brings, is that longer term decisions can be made. So, while I can’t promise you that there won’t be further changes, including to staffing, I can promise you that decisions are being made to secure better provision for your children in the longer term.”
At Christmas, the interim management team left us and Mrs Taylor announced a number of changes in staffing including Mrs Fenton taking over as SENDCo. Through work led by Mr Read, the school now has a model for the ‘Stanmore Lesson’ and the Stanmore Keys for Success: confidence, resilience, organisation, persistence and co-operation.
Our improvement journey is a continuous ongoing process where, day by day we make sustainable enhancements to the processes, practice and experience of everyone in our school. Our children are increasingly experiencing excellent opportunities to learn through a rich, varied and challenging curriculum. As a governing body, we are committed to ensuring that improvements continue to be made and we will continue to invest in our positive partnerships with parents, carers, education experts and the wider community to ensure that we are the BEST that we can be.
In the spirit of open communication, we are offering parents and carers the opportunity to meet with governors at 19:00 on Wednesday, 13th February 2019 or 09:00 on Thursday, 14th February 2019 and we hope to see as many of you as possible to discuss our progress and answer any questions you may have.
Yours faithfully,
Chris Lindsay
Chair of Governors
Fun in the snow, books, birds and new staff
Mrs Taylor’s weekly update
Thank you for making it in through the snow at the beginning and end of the day today. The children were really well behaved and ready to learn as usual, but they also enjoyed some fun time in the snow.
We have been looking at ways to improve opportunities for children to engage with reading. We would like to thank the Friends of Stanmore for the books that they have already bought. These are being used in classes. We are in the process of buying new sets of guided reading books for Year 6. Miss Young and Miss Anderson are going to work with our parent volunteers on re-opening the library for children to use after half term. This is a fantastic resource and I am really pleased that we are able to bring the library back into full use.
Last weekend some pupils took part in the Big Garden Bird Watch, Alex in Year 6 has collated all of the information and as a school we spotted 21 different types of bird and a black cat! Well done to everyone who took part.
This week I have been able to introduce parents to two of our new members of staff. Miss Laura Day joins us after Easter and met Year R parents during the curriculum evening. Mrs Lindsey Mason is working in the Ready to Learn (R2L) room and joins us after half term. She met some parents at the Year 4 parents meeting earlier this week. Once the R2L room is fully established we will invite parents in to see it work in practice. Many thanks to the parents who were able to attend the meetings. Watch out for the SATs meetings coming up after half term.
Best Wishes
Mrs S Taylor
Pride in our work, pride in our pupils
Mrs Taylor’s weekly message
It has been a pleasure to see the improved standard of the presentation of work in the children’s books this week as part of our ongoing monitoring of the quality of teaching and learning. Children are really proud of their books and I have been encouraging them to bring their work along when they collect their merits. We are continuing to positively challenge them to find ways to apply their skills in different ways.
Children have had the opportunity to develop their Stanmore Keys for Success: confidence, resilience, organisation, persistence and co-operation this week. The children who participated in the trip to King Alfred’s Statue and the football tournament to Henry Beaufort School this week were a credit to you and to the school.
Our INSET day today enabled our whole staff team to work with colleagues in a number of different schools within the Kings School Cluster. We participated in professional development linked to writing, mathematics, ICT, developing thinking skills and supporting pupils with SEND. We have taken the opportunity this afternoon to ensure that we are working more consistently in the way we meet the needs of individual pupils. This includes getting the classroom environments looking more consistent across the school.
If you are taking part in the Big Garden Bird watch this weekend, I hope you have fun and the weather is kind.
Year 4 - visiting King Alfred
Year 4 visit King Alfred’s statue in Winchester
Year 4 children walked in to Winchester to see the famous King Alfred statue. The children followed their instructions, and didn’t lose Mrs Ruddick smith on the way! They kept each other safe by identifying risks along the route, and supporting one another, sharing their findings.
The children enjoyed sketching different parts of the statue, and showed off their artistic skills beautifully. They also counted how many fingers King Alfred had, to check he hadn’t lost any in battle! They represented the school in a positive way, listening out for traffic and walking along the pavement allowing for members of the public in their path. To celebrate, when we arrived safely back at school, we had hot chocolate and marshmallows which warmed everyone up nicely.
Thank you so much to the parents and carers who walked with us, it is very much appreciated when people spare us some of their valuable time to help us.
Year 1 - a four day week
In Year 1, we have managed to pack lots of exciting learning into our four-day week!
In maths, we have been using sweets to support our learning of multiplication and division. We have started to create arrays to represent our multiplication, which has helped us to start to understand that it is commutative (can be done in any order).
For example:
2 x 4 is the same as 4 x 2
We have also started to look at division, to understand that this means to share equally between a given number. We will be continuing to develop our division skills next week, leading into fractions (halves and quarters).
The children have worked extremely hard this week to plan and write their own version of a traditional story, including some of the features that we have been learning about. These include traditional story starters and closers, use of the past tense ‘ed’, use of comparatives (er) and superlatives (est), and similes (it was as tall as a skyscraper). We have been amazed by the children’s imagination as well as the progress that has been made in their writing. Well done Year 1!
As part of our topic of ‘Go Bananas’, we will be learning about plants. To start off this topic, we worked independently to plant bean seeds in our classrooms which we will be observing carefully over the next few weeks. We have thought about the conditions necessary for the beans to grow and planted some beans in the dark and without water. We hope to be using these bean plants for our learning later on this half term.
In geography, we have been refreshing our knowledge of the 7 continents; we created a floor sized ‘map’ using masking tape and used hoops to represent the continents. We used this to sort out where different animals came from and why this might be.
In RE, we have been learning about the Jewish story of the Passover, and what this means to Jewish people. We learned about the Seder plate used at the Seder meal, and what the different items on the plate represent.
We have been building on our recorder skills in music, and as always, work on our reading and phonics skills daily.
Very many thanks to everyone who clearly labelled their child’s recorder and case – it really does make clearing away after recorder lessons so much easier!
We look forward to seeing you on Monday!
Notes:
PE lessons are on Tuesday and Friday. Please ensure that your child has a named PE kit in school on these days.
Home learning is due on 7th February.
If you are having difficulties accessing My Maths homework, please see your class teacher who will be able to print out a copy of the homework for you.
Going the extra mile
Raising expectations and challenging ourselves to continually improve our work
Since the beginning of term, we have been working on raising expectations through increasing the positive challenge in lessons. The children are enjoying this. It may be that we are asking them to edit and improve their work, like the portraits in Year 2, or the writing in Year 5 and 6; or encouraging our children to be inquisitive, by thinking of their own questions to ask about a subject and then researching the answers. As a school we are developing our approach to a ‘Stanmore lesson’ where we can help the children to ‘go the extra mile’ with their work.
As I am sure we all know, sometimes it can be difficult to ‘go the extra mile’ when we already feel that our work is the best that it can be. We are encouraging our children to take on this challenge through our Stanmore Keys for Success: confidence, resilience, organisation, persistence and co-operation. These learning behaviours will be strengthened in the coming months and we would really appreciate your support at home by re-enforcing the words so that children realise that they can get more confident and resilient by practising and developing some strategies.
As leaders and teachers we are also striving to improve, open to learning, and we are continuing to work in partnership with the local authority and Kings School amongst others to take and act on the best advice. Another really important example of this is the partnership with our parents. I have been able to meet with a number of parents this week and some parents have also met with Mrs Fenton our new SENCO. By working in partnership, we can focus together to achieve the best that we can for our children.
Friends of Stanmore - Santa fund raising and quiz time!
Our Friends have been raising more money, and have a few questions for you.
The FOS would like to thank all of the parents, carers and children who braved the cold to collect money on behalf of the FOS on Santa’s Sleigh. We can now reveal a snowtastical sum of £485 was collected. Well done to everyone that took part.
In new news, the FOS are very delighted to announce an exciting adult social event.
We are thrilled to be reintroducing our social evenings, kicking off with a quiz night on the 8th February at 7.30pm!! There will be paying bar and a raffle available on the night. Tickets will be on sale at £5 per person, time to start thinking about quirky team names.
So get that babysitter in place and get ready to channel your inner Beast or Governess and join us for a child free evening of quizzing, and a chance to catch up with other parents child free!!
Lots more will be happening over the coming term, so keep an eye on the notice board outside the office.!!
Rachel, Ali, Jen, Hayley and Jo
Year 1 - Oceans of the world and bar models
Find our what Year 1 have been up to this week
Once upon a time…
In Year 1 this week, we have been extremely productive! The children are very much enjoying their Early Morning Work tasks and are showing off their amazing spelling, drawing, writing and maths skills independently.
In maths, we have been using resources to help us with our addition and subtraction and have started to record our calculations on a number line. Towards the end of the week, we were finding the missing number in ‘empty box’ questions, using the part-part-whole model to support our understanding. This is quite tricky, but the children have shown great resilience and perseverance in their learning, which is wonderful!
Below is an example of the bar model used to find the missing number.
We have enjoyed using comparatives and superlatives in English this week, and have used these in our sentence writing about the Enormous Turnip. In addition, we have recapped on prepositions (position words) and adjectives, using the latter to write sentences with noun phrases. The children have also started to learn when to use an exclamation mark, and today, we were generating similes. We have been blown away by the children’s imagination and creativity in their writing this week! Please see the end of this page for grammar definitions.
In Geography, we have been learning about the five oceans of the world, finding the pieces of our ‘oceans’ map and fact file during a Treasure Hunt!
We became scientists when we dissected animals ‘poo’ (not real…) to investigate what different animals had eaten. From this, we could say if the animal was a carnivore, herbivore or omnivore. Lovely!
We continue to learn the recorder, this week progressing onto the ‘b’ note, and have started to learn some yoga moves in PE. AS there are so many germs about at the moment, we have been talking about the importance of hand hygiene before eating, after going to the toilet or blowing noses etc. The children are making posters to remind others to wash their hands carefully.
During our ‘Book Club’ sessions, we have focused on word reading (using a sound mat to support), repeated phrases and the use of contractions (can’t, I’ll etc.).
We continue with our phonics lessons daily.
Notes
Home learning
The date for the home learning to be returned is 7th February.
Recorders
If your child is bringing in their own recorder on a Tuesday for music, please could you ensure that both the case AND the recorder are clearly labelled. As you can appreciate, it is very hard to reunite the recorder to the right child when they are unnamed.
Show and Tell (Juniper Class)
To ensure that each child has a fair turn to Show and Tell, we now have a booking system. Children can book a place on the waiting list and once they have had a go, will get a tick next to their name. Children who have not had a turn will be offered the opportunity to Show and Tell if they want to (not compulsory!). Once we have been through everyone, we will start the waiting list again for children to have another go.
PE Kits
We will be having PE on Tuesday and Fridays. Please ensure that your child has their (labelled) kit in school on these days. Many thanks.
As always, please let us know if you have any questions or comments.
Grammar definitions
Comparatives
Compare one person, action, thing or state to another. Add the suffix ‘er’ to the original adjective.
This car is faster than that car.
Superlatives
Compares two or more people, actions, things or states. Add the suffix ‘est’ to the original adjective. Sometimes the root word might change.
This is the largest box I could find.
Did you get the tastiest apple from the fruit bowl?
Prepositions
Are used to describe time or place.
The books are in my book-bag.
Are you coming home before dinner?
Year 5 - Steam Trip
Year 5 learning all about steam engines and railways
On Wednesday 16th January, we went to Steam! After a rather long journey, we arrived and were all in awe when we saw the first train, the North Star, designed by George and Robert Stephenson.
Our first activity was all about the evolution of the railways in England, mainly that of the Great Western Railway. We learned about Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Robert and George Stephenson and Daniel Gouche, all engineers involved with the designing of railways and locomotives.
During this activity, we learnt about the roles of navvies – these were the men who did all the hard work, the digging, the pick axing. They were able to use dynamite to blow up land too! They were paid in beer and bread; occasionally they would get money tokens too.
We then learnt a few things about bridges and why they are used, how they are designed and we even got to build some! These will be very useful when we begin designing our own bridges.
After lunch, we had time to explore the museum. We were able to learn about the workers, the importance of the railways during wartime and how the women continued the work that the men had started. Not only did we learn all of this, but we were able to walk under a train, drive a train and work in a control centre. All that in a day!
