Aspen and A Midsummer Night's Dream
In year 5 this week, we have started a new text, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In order to get immersed into this test we decided to make potions as we were inspired by the love potion that features in this play.
Firstly we wrote instructions on how to make our potions. We included possible side effects such as might cause mild death, or extra limbs may grow. We were given a list of possible ingredients, these included:
Dragon blood, dragon drool, Ground Bicorn horn, Pure concentrated Beatle juice, Powdered Basilisk skin, Tentacle acid, Pond water, Hangman’s bone powder, Unicorn horn and Asphodel.
Then we recycled plastic bottles, decorating them to turn them into potion bottles, adding labels with our potions names. The last step was to create our actual potions. We thoroughly enjoyed creating our instructions for brewing these potions and then making the bottles and potions themselves.
Since then, we have been discovering the plot, rein acting scene, writing hashtag summaries and have started to watch the CBeebies version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Through these activities we have been learning about the characters personalities. We have begun to delve into the complicated way that the romances played out throughout this comedy.
So far, this has been an exciting experience for year 5 and we’re all really looking forward to what this text will bring us next.
Written by Rebekah, Lucas and Harvey
Hazel have been experimenting with fire (safely)
As we near the end of the penultimate week of this half term it has been good to look back and reflect on our learning. We have continued our studies of the Great Fire of London learning about the key events, how the fire was fought and how we use different sources of information to collect research and answer questions. We have also made good progress with making our houses ready for our recreation of what a street would have been like in the Great Fire of London.
We have continued the fire theme in to our science where we have been predicting and then testing which materials it would be best to build a house from. We thought about which materials would be flammable and then today Mr Foard the caretaker carried out a controlled fire to test the different materials. We are going to go through the ashes of the fire next week and look at what the fire did to the different materials to see whether our predictions were correct or not.
The class have been enjoying their maths over the last few weeks with many of the children asking for more challenges and showing that they are keen to deepen their knowledge of key areas. It is really encouraging to see a more resilient and persistent class beginning to appear and see the impact these learning behaviours have on the children’s attitude towards work and what they complete.
Just how great was Great King Alfred?
Year 3 and 4 have been questing just how GREAT King Alfred was in the historical studies.
On balance, we decided he was great because he:
Fought the Vikings and then made peace so that English and Vikings settled down to live together,
Tried to govern well and fairly,
Made good laws,
Believed education was important,
Had books translated from Latin into English,
Built forts and walled towns known as ‘burhs’,
Built warships to guard the coast.
So great in fact we made this lovely display to honour his achievements.
Friends of Stanmore AGM - thank you and welcome
The Friends of Stanmore want to say a massive "thank you" to everybody who attended our Annual General Meeting on Friday afternoon, it was a great to see so many familiar faces as well as some well received new ones, and brilliant to share all of the events and plans we have for the year ahead!
Following on from this I would also like to say a huge ‘Thank You’ to Rachel Dickel and Ali Henderson who have dedicated a lot of time and effort into supporting the FoS, and the school, over the past few years, and who are stepping down from their roles. Rachel Dickel will still very much be involved in supporting events (hopefully) and is also playing a vital role in the schools outside project that the FoS is supporting.
Your new committee is as follows:
Rachel Wells - Chair
Hayley Malcolm - Vice chair
Jen Lockwood - Secretary
Amy Kruger - Treasurer
Our next meeting will be on Monday 14th October at The Bell on St Cross road at 8pm, everyone welcome.
Stanmore Post - 11 October 2019
Dear Parents,
As part of our continuing improvement journey, we have made a key appointment to add to our leadership structure. Following a rigorous recruitment process last week, the Governors are delighted to have appointed Mrs Sally Atkins to the role of Assistant Headteacher.
Mrs Atkins is an experienced teacher and school leader, currently teaching In Upper Key Stage 2 at Blackfields Primary School, Southampton. She will join our school in January and we are looking forward to welcoming her to the team.
We would also like to offer our congratulations to Mrs Kempson who is expecting her first baby in the Spring !
Mrs Kempson will start her maternity leave after February half term next year. Although we will all really miss Mrs Kempson for a little while, we are really excited for her and her family.
The addition of Mrs Atkins to the Stanmore staff enables us to continue to strengthen our teaching team. We will be able to provide further details on the staffing arrangements by the end of this half term.
We are pleased to announce that we have filled our Parent Governor Vacancy. Mrs Catherine Valentine, who has children in Year R and Year 2, will be joining the Governing Body and we are looking forward to working with her.
Best wishes
Sharon Taylor
Macarena for NSPCC
Thank you to everyone who supported the performance of the Macarena to raise money for the NSPCC. For a very short performance, (which was great fun!) we raised nearly £50. Thank you to everyone who joined in, or just watched spellbound!
Hello Yellow
On Thursday, the children and staff dressed in yellow to support #HelloYellow - Mental Health Awareness Day. The children shared ideas in assembly about the importance of both physical and mental health and completed activities in their house teams focusing on strategies to keep our minds healthy. £260 was raised, and we would like to say a huge ‘THANK YOU’ to parents for supporting the event. We also need to say ‘thank you’ to Miss Shuff who worked so hard to ensure this day was recognised. Thank you – it is appreciated.
As part of our focus on Mental Health at school, Mrs Mason and Mrs Fenton will be running a session for parents on Thursday 24th October at 2.30pm. This informal session aims to promote an understanding of children's mental health and well-being and to share how we can support children both at home and at school. Please email adminoffice@stanmore.hants.sch.uk to confirm your attendance at the session so enough tea and biscuits can be available. If you would like further information about the session, please contact Mrs Fenton or Mrs Mason.
BencheS
You may have noticed some very colourful additions to the playgrounds! FOS have started a programme of grounds improvement, and this was noticeable this week after the delivery of some brightly coloured benches. These are being placed in the infant and junior playgrounds, and are just the beginning of an exciting plan to improve our school grounds. The benches have already been well used, and are clearly a valuable addition for parents and children who want to have a well-deserved sit down. We are very lucky to have such extensive grounds, and very much appreciate all the help and support being offered to make this resource the best it can be. Thank you.
Catkins search for the King of the Fairies
This week Catkins Class have been very curious about somebody called "Onion - King of the Fairies". Onion lives in our school woods so on Wednesday when we went up to our woods for our Woodland Wednesday session we were expecting to meet him.
Unfortunately he was nowhere to be seen. This lead to lots of excited conversations about where he had gone. Some of us noticed that there was lots of litter in the woods so we decided that that must be why Onion had left the woods.
The next day we received a letter from Onion himself confirming that he had left his beautiful woods because it was so full of rubbish. The children were desperate to help persuade Onion to move back so spent another afternoon in the woods litter picking - we found two whole bin bags full! Other children found a broken house they believed to be Onion's home so spent the afternoon fixing and decorating it while others drew Onion pictures and wrote him letters asking him to come back, explaining what we were doing to help him.
This afternoon Mr Foard our super duper Site Manager came to help us fix the house properly with some real tools. All of the children listened carefully to Mr Foard's safety instructions and made an excellent job of fixing Onion's home! Hopefully he will move back next week so we can finally meet him!
Rowan are checking calculations using the inverse
We have had another very busy week in Year 1 and 2 as usual. The children have impressed us all with their resilience and persistence in their work this week – we are delighted to see such great learning behaviour.
In maths, we have been continuing with our work on addition and subtraction, supporting our calculations with concrete resources to promote understanding. The children have used the bar and part-part-whole models to show prove their calculations, then writing number sentences to go with their pictorial representations. We have started to talk about using the inverse to check calculations, and proving our answers in this way.
We continue with our Read Write Inc programme every morning, but on Thursday and Friday, we enjoyed teaching English to our classes as Mr Read and Mrs Askwith were out on a course. We have been writing about the Great Fire of London, learning to use word banks for spelling and improving our work by included expanded noun phrases.
The children have been learning about making predictions in science, and using this knowledge to predict the outcome of an exciting experiment to be carried out next week. The question was ‘What is the best material for building a house?’. We discussed different possible materials and talked about the benefits and challenges for using them.
In ICT we have continued out work on being safe on line, by discussing the personal information that we can share online, and that which is not safe to share.
History has been our main focus this week – the children have been enthralled with the story of the Great Fire of London and have even been acting it out at playtime! We have learnt about the events of the week of 2nd September 1666 and written our own narrative of what happened.
To support this topic, the children have started to construct their houses from cardboard boxes. We are looking forward to completing them over the next few weeks, reading for the big finale before the end of the half term!
Stanmore Post - 4 October 2019
Dear Parents,
We are proud of the improvements that we are making in line with our school values BEST: Belonging, excellence, support and trust.
In the new OFSTED framework, schools are judged on ‘The Quality of the Education.’ Schools are expected to prioritise the teaching of phonics and early reading, as well as encouraging older pupils to read widely and deeply. Our new topics provide the framework for our school’s curriculum, which is the substance of what is taught with a specific plan of what pupils need to know in total and in each subject. You can see some of the work the children have been enjoying in our news section of our website.
The quality of the education at Stanmore Primary School is continually improving. We know this because we have regular visits from the local authority who check that we are on track with our school improvement plan. We also know this because there was a considerable improvement in outcomes for children at the end of Year 6 in July 2019.
These outcomes are the strongest that the school has seen over the last three years. We are pleased that the improvements that Governors, leaders and teachers began to implement in 2018 have had impact. This tells us that more children at Stanmore were ready for their next steps in education than seen in recent years, in terms of education, personal development, behaviour and attitude. We are working hard to secure further significant improvements in outcomes this year across the school, but particularly in phonics and early reading. Find out more about how we are continuing to work towards achieving this by attending our School Improvement meeting on 15.10.19 at 6:30pm.
You can help us by ensuring that your child attends school every day and they arrive on time. Research, and our own findings from last year’s outcomes, tells us that children who are in school receiving an education every day are more likely to be ready for the next steps in their education.
Best wishes
Sharon Taylor
Macarena for NSPCC
On Tuesday at 8.40am in the rear junior playground children will be performing the Macarena and parents are invited to join in! Mrs Horkan and Miss Norris will be leading the dance and there will be a bucket collection to raise funds for the NSPCC. We have seen a preview, and can assure you it is well worth watching!
My School CD
Earlier in the year, Miss Hurley led the school in a project to make a CD. On the CD there is one song sung by the whole school, a song sung by each year group, and 2 songs sung by the choir. We have 100 CD’s available for sale at £8 each. If you would like to purchase one, please pop into the office (they will make great Christmas presents!). Thank you.
Fitfest!
On Thursday 26th September, 9 pupils ventured out to Fitfest in Eastleigh, an event run by CAMHS to raise awareness of mental health and wellbeing. The children had an amazing day enjoying activities such as octopus pottery, cyber kindness, being bodywise and writing and singing their own sea shanty! We learnt lots of valuable facts about taking care of our mental and physical health that we have brought back to share with the rest of the school. I was very proud to be accompanying our children as they were polite and respectful to everyone we came across. Thank you to Mrs Riches for all of her help to make our day out successful. I look forward to this event again next year!
Miss Shuff
Hello Yellow
On Thursday 10th October, we are taking part in a national event in order to raise money for the mental health charity Young Minds. The children will be having an introductory assembly about mental health in an age appropriate way, followed by a lesson in class talking about feelings and how we can support our friends if we notice they are not 'ok'. In the afternoon, we are using this event as an opportunity to take part in activities in our house teams, which we know will be fun and exciting!
In order for us to raise money, we are going to hold a 'Yellow bake sale'. Everybody is invited to bring in cakes/biscuits decorated in yellow, which will be for sale after school on Thursday. Please bring them into the hall on Thursday morning.
We are also inviting everyone to come into school dressed in yellow for a donation of £1!
Whether you choose a subtle splash of colour or dress like sunshine from head-to-toe (like I will be!!), together we can show young people they’re not alone with their mental health.
We really hope everyone can pull together so we can raise as much as possible for this very relevant and fantastic cause.
Photos
Everyone should have received the photos of their children this week. We were really pleased with them and thoroughly enjoyed looking at all the smiling faces. Please ensure all orders are returned to the office ready for collection by Cardwell and Simons on 15th October 2019.
Cardwell and Simons have offered us the opportunity to hold a weekend family session to take family portraits in the Spring Term. We would be interested to know if parents would be interested in attending one of these sessions. Please let the office know to allow us to gauge interest. Thank you.
Reception Photo
The Hampshire Chronicle will be sending a photographer into school on Wednesday 9th October 2019 to take a photo of our reception class. This will be printed in the newspaper at a date to be advised nearer the time. ONLY CHILDREN WHOSE PARENTS HAVE CONSENTED TO THEIR CHILD APPEARING IN THE MEDIA WILL BE IN THE PHOTO
Sycamore have been writing the news
Sycamore Class have had a really enjoyable few weeks.
We have written really high quality newspaper articles – I am sure that the Editor for The Times will be tracking down our excellent reporters in the years to come!
A news report by Ed
A news report by Evie
We have made some silly skeletons in order to help inform Phil Neville and the Lionesses about how to stay fit and healthy.
We are really looking forward to a brilliant history workshop coming up in a few weeks too – look out for a letter about this soon!
Also, a great big thank you to parents who have helped to remind their children to do regular reading and bring in their reading diaries every day!! We really appreciate it!
Miss Evers
Skeletons made by Ed, Xavier and Zayn
Oak are being musical
In music this term we have been studying ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ by Edvard Grieg. We started off by learning the rhythm of the first few bars using picture notation; apple and pear. We applied our knowledge of one beat and two beat counts matching to the pictures. We then created our own pattern of apple and pear beats and performed our compositions to the class.
Also we learned how to accurately write musical notation on manuscript paper. We learned to follow the first two bars of ‘In the Hall of The Mountain King’ using glockenspiels and performed to each other with percussion accompaniment.
We are looking forward to composing our own tunes and performing using tuned and un-tuned instruments next week.