Dear Parents 

Welcome to our very first edition of the News Roundup for this academic year!  We have had a wonderful start to the term.  Grange Park has such a positive feel and we are looking forward to another exciting year ahead.   A warm welcome to our new nursery and reception cohort, we are delighted to have you join our Grange Park family.  

Children's attitudes have been fantastic and the children have been  proud to demonstrate our values respect, responsibility and resilience.  Learning is in full swing- it's been great to see the children in year 2 and 4 enjoying their science workshops.  The year 5 children had great fun (and learnt a thing or two) in their vikings workshop as well! 

A huge thank you to families for attending  our Meet the Teacher event.  Slides from the presentation are available on the website.  You will receive a letter next week inviting you in for Learning Conversations which is on Thursday 20 October.  This is an opportunity for you to discuss with your child's class teacher how your child has settled into school and how they've engaged with learning so far, so please do book your slot!

As you know, the GPPSA plays a vital role in not only helping to raise much needed funds for the school but also bringing our community together socially with events such as the Christmas and Summer fayre, discos and quiz nights for the parents.  It is Make or Break and unfortunately the GPPSA will no longer be able to continue if crucial roles are not filled and more parents don't volunteer to join the committee to help organise events across the school.   Please contact the GPPSA if you would like to be a member of the committee or you are able to volunteer at any events.  There will be a GPPSA AGM (Annual General Meeting) on Monday 3 October at 7:00pm in the round hall.  I hope to see many of you then.  

I'm looking forward to seeing our nursery, reception and year 1 families (siblings are also welcome!) at the picnic tomorrow on the school grounds between 11am-2pm.  This will be a great opportunity to meet other families and also find out more about the GPPSA!

With my very best wishes to you and your families

Tijen Hassan

Headteacher 

 Please click to view term dates for 2022 - 2023 

See below dates for our Autumn Term Come Learn With Me dates.  This is an exciting opportunity to come into your child's classroom and learn alongside your child! 

Thank you to those parents who have accessed the Education Child Protection online safety video for parents. We hope you have found it informative in keeping your children safe online.  Here are some key messages from the video: 

We are delighted to announce that our school has been awarded GOLD for our travel plan.  We have been working extremely hard over the last few years promoting road safety and active travel through various different activities, themed weeks and assemblies. We are delighted that the majority of children now use active travel to travel to school and our school has been accredited for it. We are so proud of all the children for their hard work!

Why is it important for my child? Children starting school in 2022 will not reach retirement age until 2086 at the earliest! Just think how much the world has changed since 1972, children starting school that year are only just reaching retirement age now. We need to equip children with life skills that will prepare them for the changing world of employment and support them to become happy and healthy adults.

As well as this, character education has been shown to have an impact on attainment, behaviour in and out of the classroom, attitudes and relationships, developing a safe and secure learning environment, student wellbeing and attendance and a students’ sense of meaning and purpose.

Supporting at home -

Model it - Whether we like it or not, our child’s eyes are always open and are always watching us. Your child looks to you to see how they should act. Be sure that you yourself are being honest in front of your child. 

Discuss consequences -  The natural consequence of lying is that people no longer view us as trustworthy. It only takes one lie to break a person’s trust in us, and trust is very difficult to rebuild. Talk about people whose word can always be trusted. Discuss what we can learn from this.

Reward Honesty -  It can be easy to deliver consequences for lies, but we don’t always give praise for honest behaviour. Reward your child’s honesty with lots of praise. Emphasis how courageous they are for telling the truth! Remember ‘if they display it, say it’.

Here is a link to a list of books you can share with your child at home.

It's that time of the year again when prospective parents can book a space on a school tour every Thursday at 9:15am.  Please pass this message onto any prospective parents! 

Click here to view our Virtual Parent Tours 

Click here to view our video for prospective parents 

Thank you to the Year 6 parents who attended the Secondary School Transfer Meeting last week.  We hope you found the meeting useful.  Click here for the presentation.  There is also lots of information available about the admission process as well as details of any secondary school open evenings on our website.  If you would like support with the application, please come along to the Round Hall after school on Friday 23 September.  

The GPPSA would like to remind all that without your support none of the fundraising is possible. If you would like to get more involved in anyway please let us know at gppsa@hotmail.co.uk or speak to any of the committee directly.  We have a WhatsApp helpers group where information is shared and everyone is welcome to join! Please contact us to find out more.

The children have made a fantastic start in nursery! They are beginning to follow the daily routines, learn with their peers and take turns and share.

What a brilliant start to the year Reception have had! It has been a real pleasure to welcome the children into school and to see them so eager and excited for each new day. We have been reading stories about making friends and used circle time to discuss how to be a good friend as well as playing circle games to get to know each other.  The children have been busy exploring their new classrooms and our fantastic outdoor area!

Year 1 have enjoyed listening to their story of the month. They have been reading the 3 Billy goats Gruff. They drew the setting and made puppets of the characters. Over the last week we have been acting out the story using both our puppets and becoming the characters ourselves.

Year 2s have been busy learning and following new routines. We’ve enjoyed going bird watching in school and even found a Robin! Also, we have learnt to sketch our class birds looking at simple shapes which we then added detail to. We had the choice of pastels and colour pencils to add texture and shading.  On Monday, we showed resilience when crafting our London acrostic poems. We utilised our knowledge of nouns and adjectives to generate our ideas.  

A great start to the new year for our year 3’s!  The children have been learning new routines and meeting new expectations in the busy learning we have done over the first few weeks. We have begun the new year exploring each of the trees that represent our classes, finding facts and information about them, writing poems about their shapes and colours, before exploring how each tree changes through the seasons to create some effective art pieces.  The art has continued as we have begun to look at our focus artist for this term; Stephanie Peters.  Analysing her work at blending colours before having a go ourselves and creating different tones related to fire.

The children have made an incredible start to life in year 5!  We started the new year exploring our class planets. Using search engines, we researched our class planet and created Google Slides to present our findings. We then represented the solar system and our class planet using chalk pastels in art, considering what makes our planet unique. Continuing our learning about the solar system, we wrote a ‘Six Ways to Look at the Moon’ poem, using a range of poetic devices.

In the first few days back, the children have spent their time discussing their experiences during their holiday, thinking about their goals and aspirations for the year ahead and settling into their new classes. Everybody has adapted very well to the new routines and expectations. The focus of this week has been around the children’s class artists, where they have begun writing biographies in English and imitating their style of work during art lessons. We’re looking forward to seeing the Year 6 children excel this year!