Year 1 - 2D shapes, beans and fruit

Happy half term!

We have reached the halfway point in the year – a term and a half completed and a term and half to go! The children have worked extremely hard in their learning this week and have produced some excellent pieces of work. We are very proud of their achievements!

In maths, we have been exploring 2D shapes. After naming a range of 2D shapes, we learnt about their properties, using the language of ‘edges’ and ‘vertices’ to describe them. The children made Mr Men ‘ID badges’ for the different shaped characters, and played games of shape ‘odd one out’. We also used hoops to sort shapes according to different criteria. Some children drew their own Venn diagrams to help them to explain their thinking. 

In English, the children planned and wrote their instructions for making a fruit kebab. They published their work into bordered paper and used them to ‘teach’ their parents/carers when they visited the classroom on Thursday for our ‘Go Bananas! outcome.  They also write a mini questionnaire which they used at the end of the afternoon to evaluate their work. We were amazed by the quality of the writing, sentence structure and presentation – well done Year 1! Many thanks to everyone who supported our outcome on Thursday, we had a wonderful time!

Our beans have grown beautifully and we have been able to have a close look at the different parts of the plant in our science lessons. We have been investigating the life cycle of a bean plan, drawing and labelling our own version today. Some of the children were able to write an explanation of how the bean was growing at each stage. 

In PSHE, we have been thinking about making choices and their consequences. We thought about good and not so good choices, and how they might make us feel. 

Notes:

Reading books

Over half term, the coloured band boxes will be topped up with some new readers which were purchased by FOS. Thank you to FOS – I know that the children will love having some exciting new books to read!

PE

We will be returning to our Wednesday and Friday PE slots next half term. Please ensure that your child has a PE kit (clearly labelled) that fits in school on these days. 

Music 

We continue with recorder lessons on Tuesdays.

Have a wonderful half term! Thank you for your continued support.

E-safety and 500 words

This week the whole school have been learning about e-safety. Safer Internet Day is celebrated globally in February each year in over a hundred countries to promote the safe and positive use of digital technology for children and young people and inspire a national conversation. Coordinated in the UK by the UK Safer Internet Centre, the celebration sees hundreds of organisations get involved to help promote the safe, responsible and positive use of digital technology for children and young people.

Safer Internet Day is a fantastic opportunity to reflect as a family about how you can use the internet and technology safely, responsibly and positively. Whether you are a parent, grandparent, foster carer, aunt, uncle or older sibling – we can all play a role in empowering children to enjoy their time online! To find out more CLICK HERE

You may have heard of BBC Radio 2's short story-writing competition for children, in association with Oxford University Press. Stanmore School children are entering this year so prepare to be amazed. Children from Year 5 and 6 took part in a live interactive programme for schools, inspiring children to come up with their own amazing 500 Words story ideas.

We were delighted to see the name of our school appear on the screen! To watch the lesson again CLICK HERE

Good luck to everyone participating in the competition! Don’t forget your Keys for Success.

As leaders and teachers we are continuing our improvement journey. We are looking forward to working in partnership with you at our school improvement meetings next week: Wednesday evening 7pm and Thursday morning 9am. We hope to see you there.

Year 1 - Fruit-tastic fun!

The penultimate week of the half term has been bursting at the seams with learning for our two wonderful Year 1 classes!

In maths, we revisited our ‘time’ learning, which started with us sequencing events which happen earlier/later, before/after within a day.

Examples: 

• I go to bed after I have brushed my teeth.

• Before I have my tea, I play with my sister.

• Breakfast time is earlier than lunchtime.

We have worked hard to learn how to tell the time to half past the hour, which can be tricky, but both classes were incredible and showed their ability to read and make half past times brilliantly. 

We also learnt how to describe, compare, estimate and measure capacity. 

The children enjoyed gathering information for their fruity fact file, which they wrote during the week. We participated in ‘Safer Internet Day’, learning what being ‘online’ means and what we can do online. The children discussed the importance of not sharing personal information with others online, thinking about how they can help themselves to stay safe and when to ask for help. 

For information about staying safe online, please click the link https://www.saferinternet.org.uk/safer-internet-day/2019

Happily, our beans have been growing beautifully in their plastic bags in the classrooms. We were able to use our own beans plants to label each part of the plant. Next, the children wrote or explained the function of the different parts. 

As part of our geography/art learning, the children worked in groups to produce a collaborate art work of the continents. This was quite tricky, involving a variety of different skills, but the work produced was excellent – the groups are very proud of their work!

In RE, we concluded our work on Passover by thinking about specific foods or drinks that are important to us, and what they might symbolise. 

We continue with guided reading and phonics daily. 

Very many thanks to everyone who has handed in their home learning – what a wide variety of fruits and vegetables you have tried! If you have not yet brought yours in – no problem. We look forward to seeing your creative works! 

Notes:

Go Bananas outcome: Thursday 14th February at 2.30pm in classrooms

Longdown Dairy Farm trip payments due: Friday 15thFebruary 

Year 1 - Let it snow...

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

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

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

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 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

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.