Maple imagining London in 1666
This week as part of our history, we looked at some pictures of how London was back in 1666. The children discussed what jobs people might have had, what the houses were like, what the streets might have felt like to walk in and how people lived. We then decided to create our own London streets with children taking on different roles. We had bakers, a fishmonger, some beggars and some shoe shiners. We even had others sweeping the streets and some farmers delivering hay on their horse and cart! The classroom was buzzing and the children were very animated whilst acting out their roles – this made writing about the differences between the streets of London in 1666 and the present day more interesting.
Stanmore Post - 27th September 2019
Dear Parents,
This week we have appointed our new House Captains for our four houses. Congratulations!
The House Captains were appointed after an application process. As part of the application process, children in Year 6 were asked to explain what our Keys for Success and the school values: Belonging Excellence Support and Trust mean to them and how they demonstrate them in their daily life at school.
Belonging to a house team, striving for excellence through various competitions, supporting your house team and trusting your team members to do their best for the house is a very real way of bringing our school values to life. The vast majority of our children demonstrate the school values and the keys for success on a daily basis, which made selecting only 8 house captains quite challenging, as you can imagine. Thank you to all of Year 6 who applied and were unsuccessful, there will be other opportunities.
We are continuing to work on our school improvement plan. There is an opportunity for parents to find out more about the key areas for improvement at a meeting on 15.10.19. This event is on the School Calendar. https://www.stanmore.hants.sch.uk/our-school-calendar
One area that we have started to improve is the school building and grounds. Find out more about this at https:// www.stanmore.hants.sch.uk/news/2019/9/27/improving-our-environment-inside-and-out
Best wishes
Sharon Taylor
Birch decide who the body belongs to
Year 3 / 4 have had another exciting week. The children concluded that Raedwald, the ruler of the East Angles, was the person who was buried with the ship at Sutton Hoo, from the clues they had investigated.
In music we are continuing to enjoy working on the Hall of the Mountain King and have started to compose our own pieces using a variety of instruments.
In science, the children enjoyed learning about bones and have made some amazing skeletons.
After watching a short film, Rukus, the children have loved writing newspaper reports about two outlaws, Frank and Jesse, who steal a ruby from a speeding train in the Arizona Desert.
Improving our environment - inside and out
We are lucky to have a school with so much space both inside and out. Recently we started our project to make the most of this asset for everyone - making the building and grounds the BEST that they can be.
Just before the summer holidays Hampshire County Council completed the sale of the old dining room land (just outside the school grounds near the railway line). We are working with Hampshire on how we can use the proceeds from that sale to help make some significant improvements to the school building. We will share more information as these plans start to come together, but it will take a little bit of time before things start to move on this.
In the meantime, we are not hanging around. With the help of the Friends of Stanmore, Mr Foard our new site manager and many others we are making a difference. Here are some of the things we have been doing or are in our plan.
We have cleared the outdoor classroom area and we now have four raised beds ready to be adopted by each of our school Houses. They will compete in a Stanmore in Bloom competition later in the year.
If you are able to help your child’s House become the clear winner, then we need your green fingers, your expert advice, imagination and a bit of time. The Friends of Stanmore will be in touch with more details in the coming weeks.
Moving onto the field. In this area we will be installing three Willow Tee Pees paid for by the Friends of Stanmore. This will give a lovely place for the children to play and explore.
Talking of the back field, we have been using this great space for both playtime and lunchtime since the beginning of term.
We’re currently working through how we enable the children to use the field in through the winter. We are thinking about wellies and wet weather trousers at the moment, but we’ll communicate more on this shortly.
We’ve repaired the fencing and the steps around the play equipment and the children are now enjoying the use of the this during their playtime and lunchtimes. There is plenty of scope to help them use up some excess energy.
The area around the pond has been cleared and the children have been studying some of the wildlife we share our environment with in lessons recently.
We have engaged a contractor to come to site during the October half term to give the greenery a good haircut and help us to get some the bushes around the school back under control.
We haven’t stopped with the outside though. During the summer we moved the Stanmore Library and the Ready to Learn inside the main school building. The old library space in the quad is now an outside classroom which is being used daily for intervention.
Elm exploring art with chalk and debating criminality
This week in Elm class, we were inspired by Charles Keeping who was an artist that illustrated the Highwayman Poem. To create our own drawings we had to produce two versions: the first one we completed with pencil and the other with chalk. By drawing on black paper with chalk we created images which fitted well with the end of the poem where Bess and the Highwayman become ghostly figures.
In English this week, we have been questioning this statement: The Highwayman was a criminal. Our brilliant ideas led to us planning and taking part in a debate. During the debate everyone had a say. We used evidence from the text to back up our ideas, thoughts and opinions. It was very exciting!
Written by Manas and Lily-Sue
Stanmore Post - 20th September 2019
Dear Parents,
We all want our children to develop fluency, confidence and enjoyment in reading. Thank you for your support in reading with your children and completing the reading diaries. We are seeing the vast majority of these returned each day. This has a really positive affect on their learning.
In EYFS and KS1, children are being taught phonics using a scheme called Read write Inc. Phonics. This scheme teaches children to read accurately and fluently with good comprehension. They learn to form each letter, spell correctly, and compose their ideas step-by-step. There are videos on our website that will help parents understand more about how we teach phonics and how to pronounce the letter sounds as pure sounds. Your support with this is very much appreciated. https://www.stanmore.hants.sch.uk/phonics
Behaviour throughout the school this week has been positive, with many children receiving Dojo Points for showing one of our keys for success: respect, resilience, co-operation, persistence, confidence and organisation.
Our newest children in Early Years have settled in really well over the last two weeks and we are looking forward to seeing them in school full time from Monday.
Best wishes
Sharon Taylor
Online Payments and Communication
We would like to thank everyone for their support with our new online system. May has been working hard to smooth over any problems. There is a help page for parents with frequently asked questions which you may find useful: help.scopay.com, but you are always welcome to contact the office.
It is vital that we have up-to-date contact details for parents/carers. We will send out copies of our pupil data next week; please read them and correct any errors/make amendments as necessary. We also have children in school with medical issues about which we have no knowledge, and no medication – this becomes a serious problem when the issue becomes apparent. Please ensure you inform the office of any new medical issues that may arise. All medication is to be given to the office to register – not the class teacher. Thank you.
Next week, we will be fitting a leaflet display in the office. There will be a holder for each class, where we will display any letters sent out. We will also have a holder for the Stanmore Post, and one for general information, such as dates for your diary. Our intention is to go paperless, and send all information out electronically, but we understand that this is not currently possible for all our families and not everyone has access to a printer. For the next two weeks, we will send out paper copies of the Stanmore Post to allow everyone the opportunity to understand the importance of signing up to Scopay. Thank you.
Football Tournament
The boys represented Stanmore School at the North Eastleigh and Winchester football tournament on 11th September and the Year 6 girls represented our school at the girls’ football tournament on Thursday 19th September. Both teams showed great sportsmanship and played to the best of their ability. Unfortunately, we didn’t make it to the finals but both teams enjoyed taking part.
Well done everyone involved and thank you to the parents for all your support in transporting your children to the events. Next week, we have been invited to take part in a table tennis tournament at Kings School, taking place on Wednesday 25th September. We wish them well!
Aspen investigate a crime scene
Coming back to school, there was an exciting sight to be found next door.
We were told to investigate the scene of the crime in groups. One by one we looked at the evidence and reported back to our groups about one thing that we saw. Using all the clues that we gathered, we worked together in our groups to make up our own theories on what had occurred. We shared our theories with the class and answered some questions that would further develop our investigation.
Later that day we looked at the first verse of a poem called, “The Highwayman” by Alfred Noyes. We are now deeply focused on it in our English lessons. We also acted out verses of the poem in groups of two, three or four.
In topic, we have started to look at crime and punishment. So far, we have taken and looked at fingerprints, matching similar patterns within them to each other’s. We learned that everyone has different fingerprints, so the police use them to help find a criminal.
We are enjoying our topic and hook to our learning. We are excited to see what comes next.
Willow are thinking about food!
Year 3 / 4 have had an exciting week. The children have been archaeologists uncovering the Anglo Saxon ship at Sutton Hoo and using clues from the artefacts found to reveal the mystery of the empty grave.
In music we are continuing to enjoy working on the Hall of the Mountain King and will start to compose our own pieces.
In science the Ladies English Football team manager, Phil Neville has asked for our help to ensure the ladies are in peak condition to reach the final in the World Cup. We discovered that they are eating too much sugar and not enough portions of fruit and vegetables which made us consider how healthy our diets are.
Hazel class travelling back in time
We have had a great start to our time together in Hazel class so far this term. We have spent time getting to know each other and also remind ourselves about how to be the best we can be in and out of class. A class charter has been agreed by everyone and we are making sure that we follow both our class and school rules.
This week we had an exciting experience. Mr Read had a message that we needed to travel back in time to 1666, as there was a mystery that needed to be solved. We all made ourselves time travelling headbands, got in our time machine which took us back in time to 1666 where we discovered a spade standing in the ground. Some of us did some digging and discovered a bottle of wine, a block of cheese and an extract from a diary by someone called Samuel Pepys. He left us with a question which was “What if London hadn't burnt down?” Once we had got back in our time machine and returned to 2019 we looked at the clues in the diary again and some of us realised that the event that was being talked about what the Great Fire of London. The next few weeks we are all looking forward to learning about this important historic event and answering Samuel Pepys question.
Parent Governor Vacancy
Interested in becoming a Governor at the school. Apply now.
Dear Parents / Carers,
Stanmore Primary School has always aimed for a partnership with parents which undoubtedly brings great benefits to the children. One of the most significant ways you can help in promoting this aim is to volunteer to be a parent governor.
The governing body's main tasks are:
to ensure that the school has a clear vision, ethos and strategic direction;
to hold the headteacher to account for the educational performance of the school and its pupils;
to oversee the financial performance of the school and making sure its money is well spent.
Parent governors are welcomed as valued members of the team and play a vital role in ensuring the governing body is aware of the views of parents and the local community. We feel sure that there are parents prepared to take on this important role and give their time and commitment to helping us to continue to improve the school's performance.
In looking to fill this vacancy the governors of the school have identified the following skills, experience and attributes that they feel would be desirable to help strengthen the governing body:
experience in education and/or curriculum development
experience in HR
experience in finance
If you are interested in applying for the role, and but do not have the desirable skills and experience, then we would still like to hear from you and we encourage you to apply outlining the skills you are able to offer.
Training and support will be available to help you develop into the role. This will include in-house mentoring and support as well as access to external governor training.
If you feel you can help in this capacity please download an application form or contact the school office for a copy of the form,which will need to be completed and returned to the school, care of the Headteacher, by 12.00 noon on Monday, 30th September 2019.
The guidelines giving full details about how vacancies are filled can be found on the information for prospective governors on the Hampshire County Council website. You will find video, e-learning and written information on the site and all of these will provide you with further details about the role.
Please note that for the protection of children all governor appointments are subject to an identity check.
If there are more applications than vacancies, we will hold an election and you will be sent a voting paper in due course. You may return the ballot paper either via your child or by post.
Yours sincerely
Chris Lindsay
Chair of Governors