It’s Bearly Believable…

But yes, Norton Infant School has it’s very own Bear Cub – Crewso!

A short while ago, I launched a competition to design a limb or part of a large fibre glass bear cub in aid of raising funds for Leeds Children’s Hospital, who are currently supporting one of our families. Below is Bruce, who has found the very first bear on the Leeds Bear Hunt Trail, at Leeds Hospital whilst receiving his treatment.

We have received some beautiful, thoughtful and intricate entries for the competition from most year groups across the campus and I am very proud to announce the artists taking part in the design and decoration of our very own bear cub are…. Ava from 6SO, Evelyn from 4TE, James from 3LG, Olivia in Class 4, Isla in Class 2, Alarna in Class 1 and Lily-Mai in Nursery. As the project forms part of a legacy from our 2022 Foundation Stages Autumn Expedition of “How do we care for the bears?” Every child in the Foundation Stage and Nursery will be contributing their hand print to the final design also.

The artwork on the bear has commenced and each child has been carefully following their designs to produce an outstanding piece of art, which will be displayed in Leeds City Centre over the summer. Everyone is invited to visit our bear and take part in the Leeds Bear Hunt and feel proud that we have contributed to this fantastic event in aid of such a worthy cause. These children are activists making a difference to their community and we are incredibly proud of them. With teamwork and collaboration anything is possible! Here is a sneak peak of what has been happening….

Keep your eyes peeled for the finished bear over the coming week, before it makes it’s trip to Leeds for it’s temporary home over the summer during the trail. After the trail has finished the bear will return to us at the Infant School to live in our EYFS outdoor space as it’s forever home. There will be more fund raising events happening throughout the rest of the school year, to contribute towards the sponsorship of our bear cub, to raise money for the Leeds hospitals charity. As always your support is greatly appreciated and we are truly thankful that we can make a difference together as a community. For more information follow #Leedsbearhunt #Leedsbearhunt2023 #leedshospitalscharity

Red Nose Day Competition 🔴

We have been so impressed with the t-shirt designs around school today. Below are the winners from the different classes, voted for by the children. Our overall winner, picked by Mrs Ponsonby is . . . Brooke!

We will make sure all of our winners get their prizes on Monday morning – well done everyone!

Thank you to everyone who wore red, designed a shirt or made a contribution to Comic Relief.

Mrs Parsons xx

Stay and Investigate

As part of our celebrations for Science Week, we invited our adults to investigate with us! We followed instructions to make slime, planted our own sunflower seeds to take care of, made and tested cup phones and recreated the life cycle of a butterfly.

Thank you to all of the grown ups who joined us to become scientists for the morning.

Mrs Parsons xx

International Women’s Day 2023

Each year, March 8th is observed as International Women’s Day to celebrate the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women from all around the world

Today in Crew Parsons, we talked about women who have been influential in our lives and women we have learned about during our expedition and crew such as Rosa Parks, Greta Thunberg and Professor Sarah Gilbert.

The children generated words which are qualities we think these women all have. They then decided who they know who show them these qualities everyday. We made our word cloud into cards to show the people at home and school how much we appreciate them – so if you received a card today – thank you for being influential to the children in my crew 💛

Mrs Parsons xx

Muffin Research!

This morning in class 5 we have been preparing for our next recipe. We have decided to make muffins – but with a healthy twist!

We started by researching lots of different muffin recipes and decided what the main ingredients were, what we could change and made an anchor chart of imperative verbs came across to help us with our recipes.

We then did a tally chart of our favourite types of muffins to decide which we wanted to bake. I was really impressed at how confident we were counting in 5’s.

Next we got busy generating our shopping lists ready for our baking. We thought about prices, using commas in a list and some of us even completed Mrs Parsons’ Asda order ready for tomorrow!

Awesome job class 5.

Tranquil Tuesday meets origami . . .

We decided to put our reading skills to good use this morning and revamp our bookmarks!

We read instructions carefully and followed the directions to make some new cool bookmarks.

It was lovely to see everyone supporting each other with the reading, cutting or folding. It meant the whole of Crew Parsons left with a completed book mark.

Well done guys ❤️

Mindfullness Techniques

This morning in crew we have been trying out some different calming techniques to help us. We tried out three different ones.

The first was finger breathing. This is where you use the outline of your hand to help you breathe in and out. One round gave you five, big relaxing breaths.

The next was called settling thoughts. This one was where you focussed on the sounds you could hear around you like birds tweeting, mindful music or the wind in the trees.

The final strategy was the listening game We heard the sound of a bell and we had to activate our listening to see how long we could hear the bell for.

Elizabeth enjoyed the listening game because it was really calming. Jack agreed! Katya liked the finger breathing strategy because she hadn’t seen anything like that before. Lottie enjoyed the finger breathing too because she was able to close her eyes and really focus.

I wonder when we could use these strategies outside of crew sessions.

Great start to the week Crew Parsons xx