Stanningley Primary School

Unfortunately due to Covid we weren't able to hold our annual sports day for the children. Gaz our P.E teacher ensured the children had a wonderful time taking part in little races following their learning from the PE lessons.

We wanted to do something special to celebrate the children's achievements this year so decided to have a small picnic at school. The children made their own sandwiches and played on the tires and on the trim trail.

We learnt about keeping our bodies healthy, being active and eating healthy foods. We read the stories about Oliver and his vegetables and his fruit salad. We tried some different vegetables and made fruit salad. Some of us even went to buy some fruit from Tesco.

Mrs. Rivers has taught us lots of wonderful songs and allowed us to play some wonderful instruments to tap along to the beat, create our own patterns and use our bodies to make percussion.

We have had a wonderful time exploring and learning in all areas of provision. We have independently learnt lots of different things and extended our learning by completing tasks.

Following our maths lesson, we challenged the children to make a boat and see how many marbles it took to sink their boat. The children used the making area and any other resources their thought would make a good boat before adding the marbles one at a time until it sank.

Another PE lesson saw us working with Rugby balls. We were shown how to hold a ball correctly and enjoyed playing a game which involved team work. We had to use our skills to move in different directions and not be caught from the ball holder – if we were then we had to stand in the shape of a banana and have a friend release us by moving our arms down and set us free!

We have had some wonderful sunny weather and have enjoyed our time exploring and playing outside. We have climbed our tree, been on holiday in an airplane, driven to the coast in a car and even built our very own buildings! We have worked together building water chutes and even had time to stop and have a quick drink.

During a PE lesson we enjoyed playing with the parachute and working together to move the beanbag around each section. We worked together to balloon the chute and pass underneath listening carefully to the instructions. As well as learning how to put the parachute away as a team.

In math we have revisited the properties of 2d shapes and enjoyed making pictures through shape. We continue to look at numbers beyond 10. We have used 10 frames and played lots of different games to embed our learning including math link cubes.

We enjoyed having PE outside with Gaz, we revisited finding space and enjoyed looking at finding different ways to move. We pretended to be secret agents and stopped at one point to watch a helicopter fly overhead – we wondered if it was a secret mission. Some children were chosen to roll a ball and this indicated if we ere stood on the correct secret colour.

We started this half term planting seeds and finding out what a seeds needs to grow. We have enjoyed planting both flower and vegetables. We have read lots of different stories related to plants such as, The Tiny Seed, How a Seed Grows, Oliver’ s Vegetables. We are completing the half term by reading the story Jim’s Beanstalk.

Returning from lockdown the children enjoyed researching about different bears. We finished our learning with inviting our teddies from home to join in a teddy bears picnic. Our teddies had to come into school early so that they were safe. We made our bears a hat and a label so that everyone knew their name. We enjoyed making jam sandwiches and playing different games such as musical bears and pin the nose on the bear.

We have had a special visitor from a scout elf from the North Pole, each morning we have looked around our environment to see what he has been up to! He has helped us to make the right choices so Jingles the elf could tell Santa. Even Mrs Brewer came to see him! We have been enjoying completing Christmas activities to take home with us when we break up.

We have been learning our letter sounds, we have explored the letters and completed challenges to show our understanding. We have played games with letter sounds and even tried to find things beginning with certain letters.

We used our hand prints to create a friendship heart. We painted our hands and put them into a heart shape to show we are all different.

We enjoy making mark in all areas of our provision. We use different media and materials to create desired effects.

We have learnt about the numbers 1,2 3 and 4. We have learnt what the numbers look like, how many objects represent each number. We have watched the Numberblock videos to help us visualize the numbers in different ways. We have used dinosaurs, teddys, numicon and lots of other objects to show our understanding of each number. We have started to use the part whole model showing different ways to give a total of a given number. We have looked for numbers in our environment and completed mathematical challenges during our explore time.

We were so excited when we saw the snow falling.... we couldn't wait to explore outside!!!!

We have had lots of fun, playing and learning outside in the sun, rain and even snow. We have made marks using pencils and paper and chalk on different surfaces. We are very lucky to have a apple tree where we can gather apples for our snack.

The children in Early Years came to school dressed up in lovely bright coloured clothes, some even had Pudsey bear t-shirts, headbands and jumpers. We had a photo taken with a picture of Pudsey Bear because he couldn't come visit us this year.

For your homework this week we would like you to make an owl using any resources you can find, even a beautiful picture would be lovely. Here is a video of Mrs. Pritchatt making an owl from paper. We look forward to seeing your creations.

Mrs Whitehead brought a massive pumpkin to school, it was so heavy that it was very difficult to lift it up, we all tried though ! There is a story about an enormous turnip, do you know it ? We also collected some other pumpkins and we looked at their similarities and differences. It takes about 90 days to grow a pumpkin, can you count to 90 ? Pumpkins have their seeds inside them and if you scoop them out and cut the skin you can make a lantern for Halloween.

We are lucky enough to have some fruit trees in our school garden and this year the apple crop has been amazing. We went outside to harvest them and we collected them in baskets that became very heavy when they were full. We counted our apples, we washed our apples and we had great fun eating our apples. We know a song about shiny red apples and our crop was perfect for the song. We enjoyed some lovely stories about apples and we ate along with mouse making our apples get smaller with every nibble and crunch. Like the sunflower the apple also has seeds, they are easier to count. How many seeds can you see inside this apple?

We had some huge sunflowers heads to observe. We noticed that the petals were curling and we could see all the seeds in the flower head. We tried to count them, can you? We used magnifying glasses to look at them closely, and we could a tiny ladybird that was going for a walk across the seeds, can you see it ? We made drawings and paintings inspired by the sunflowers. The artist Vincent Van Gogh made some paintings of his sunflowers too.

The season has changed. Autumn has arrived and the leaves are changing colour and falling from the trees. The squirrels are enjoying the acorns and we have collected conkers. The conkers are ideal for counting and the leaves made beautiful prints. We used clay to make hedgehogs. We used our fine motor skills to manipulate the clay and place the spikes.

Since September we have had fun getting to know each other and making friends. We have explored our environment both indoors and outside and we have been learning to take turns and share.