Dear Parents

We have had a great half term here at Grange Park with the children fully engaged in their wonderful learning. I can't believe the children in reception have already been in our school for half a term! They have all settled in really well, engrossed with their learning, particularly in their outdoor area!

The children in Year 6 children had an amazing time at PGL last week. It was lovely to hear that they were all really supportive of each other, were great at persevering and working as a team! I know you will join me in thanking the staff for their hard work, time and patience!

It was great to see so many reception and year 1 parents attend the phonics workshops, scroll down for the links to the slides. Do note the dates for the coming parent workshops this term which includes Maths workshop for parents and a workshop on supporting your child with emotional regulation.

We are looking forward to our Autumn Term Come Learn With Me which is in early November. This is a great opportunity for parents to come into school and work alongside their child in the classroom! See the dates below.

Hope you all have a restful half term and see you all back at school on Monday 31 October.

With my very best wishes

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!

Raise your child’s attendance and raise their chances: Missing school means missing out, attending regularly allows your child to:

1. Access learning

2. Be involved in all aspects of school life

3. Feel prepared for lessons each day

4. Make friendships and develop social skills

5. Be better prepared for secondary school

When children arrive late to class it is disruptive to the rest of the class and can make your child feel embarrassed, unsettled and upset about going into a lesson.

Here are some good ways to encourage good attendance:

1. Know the routines of the school day, e.g. have they got their reading book?

2. Help to get everything ready the night before e.g. uniform, snack.

3. Establish a good bedtime routine so your child can sleep well and make mornings less of a struggle.

4. Praise and reward good attendance, even small successes e.g. getting ready

Let's work together to encourage great attendance

1. Be particularly watchful and supportive in the run up to any assessments

2. Talk to us - we may be able to help and support you and your child if they sometimes want to stay at home. You are not alone, we can work together to find solutions so that little problems don’t become big ones!

3. Help them to catch up on missed work.

Other ways to support your child’s attendance:

1. Report your child’s absence straight away on ParentMail

2. Only allow days at home for genuine illness (you will know!)

3. Avoid taking holidays during term time, these are not authorised

4. Medical appointments should be made (or changed to) out of school hours

As Parents it is your legal responsibility to ensure that your child comes to school regularly and on time. All absence and lateness is monitored by the school and the Local Authority’s Education Welfare Officer.

If Grange Park can improve their attendance overall by 1%, they will see a 5-6% improvement in attainment (DfE). Please help us and your child by ensuring their attendance remains above 97% allowing them to achieve their full potential.

We are pleased and excited to announce School Parliament 2022-2023. Since the start of term, Year 6 and children across the school have been working hard writing applications and preparing speeches ready for the elections that took place on Monday 3 October. The Year 6 MPs made excellent speeches during family assemblies, outlining brilliant manifestos that we can see having a great impact on the children’s experiences at Grange Park. They spoke confidently and with clarity whilst filling the room with anticipation of what was to come. The whole school voted for the speeches and MPs that they thought would best represent the school and have the most impact. As well as this, children in class had the opportunity to tell their peers why they would make a good councillor so that they would vote for them.

Our MPs for 2022-2023 are:

Our Class Councillors are:

This week, Year 5 were lucky enough to have visitors from Airbus come to work with the children. They are currently working on a way to retrieve rock samples from Mars and return them to Earth. They explained that an issue with space is the amount of debris. The children had to design a robot that would collect the debris safely then create a model using recycled materials. This showed them that resources can be reused for important purposes.

Over the course of the last three weeks, 796 children from Nursery to year 6 have taken part in the sponsored Grange Park Mini Marathon to help raise money for our school playgrounds and provide much needed resources for the children to engage in purposeful play during lunchtime. Coinciding with the TCS London Marathon, the children have run, jogged or walked 2.6 miles, 45 minutes over three days. This was a challenge, and for some a really big challenge, as they have never covered this sort of distance before. We were so proud of how they persevered. We could see on a lot of their faces that they wanted to stop and sit down at times, but they kept on going! They showed great unity in their year groups by cheering on and encouraging the others. We were equally proud of our Year 6 helpers who really supported the runners with their motivational high fives and mantras.

Don’t worry if you haven't collected all of your money yet, there is still time to bring in your sponsor money. Alternatively you can make a direct donation to our just giving page.

As well as the school mini marathon, on the 1st October 2022, 86 children from Grange Park Primary School took part in the first ever TCS Mini London Marathon. The children, wearing their special mini marathon numbered bib, set off from the start line by Horseguards Parade. They ran the one mile distance towards Buckingham Palace (giving King Charles III a wave as they went past), into Green Park before crossing the finish line further along the Mall. The spectators cheered the runners on as did the police officers on bicycles who escorted the children along the track. As they ran up to the finish line the loudspeaker called out a huge well done to the children of Grange Park. Well done everyone for taking part. We are incredibly proud of you and it was so wonderful to have the school buzzing with talk of the marathon last week and of course to see all of your medals.

Well done also to our very own Hannah Barnard, class teacher to Leopard class, for completing her first London Marathon in 4 hours and 23 minutes. Hannah raised a whopping £1600 for Shooting Stars Children’s Hospice. Hannah had an amazing day and is considering her next Marathon, possibly in New York or further afield.

Are you looking to showcase your creative skills or even develop them? Then the ‘KS2 Adobe Creative challenge!’ is for you! As part of the home learning challenge across KS2, we would like you to choose one of the themed challenges based on making either a web page, video or flyer!

To enter, upload your final project/link to the assignment labelled ‘KS2 Adobe Creative Challenge’ on your Google Classroom. We look forward to seeing your entries! The winners will be announced in the first news round up after half term!

The children were very excited and helped themselves to our new style salad bar. Even the staff were pleased and impressed with the improvements and the kitchen staff were proud of what they put together!

Kandinsky Class are supporting The Felix Project. This charity prevents more than 25 tonnes of food entering landfill and helps distribute over 50,000 free meals each week.

Amazingly, at Grange Park, we have weekly deliveries on Thursday. There is a stall near the main gate. Please bring your own bags to collect this food as these are not provided. There is a one bag limit to ensure that this food is available for all.

The food can be past its ‘best before’ date, misshapen or just surplus. As we do not have time to check each item, please ensure you check the food your child is given.

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.

Nursery has been busy investigating giant sunflower heads and plants from our school allotments. The children used their senses to touch and feel the heads, compare the different seeds and they were curious to smell the different sensory plants: lavender, rosemary and mint ‘smells like chewing gum…toothpaste’

They investigated independently using different tools and discovered new ways of collecting seeds: fingers, tweezers, forks and they worked collaboratively to take turns and assume different roles in their learning: sieving, collecting fallen seeds, picking seeds and counting seeds.

Reception have been growing in confidence and independence during lunchtimes. To support the children they had a visit from the Pantry who supply the lunches at school every day. The Pantry came to help the Reception children learn how to use their knife and fork.

The children had a variety of fruit and vegetables to practise cutting up including carrots, cucumber and apples. They learnt that their pointing finger should be on the top of their knife and fork and face towards their plate.

They were then taught to stab, slice and saw their food in order to successfully cut it. The children had time to practise and all did so well!

Finally they enjoyed tasting lots of different flavoured smoothies. To make the smoothies the teachers had to pedal as fast as they could to blend all the fruits. Mango was a firm favourite amongst all the classes!

This half term Year 1’s RE topic has been Christianity, focusing on Harvest Festival. The children enjoyed visiting St Peter’s Church where Rev. Stephen kindly welcomed us, explaining the significance of Harvest and told the children the parable of the Ten Apples which explains the importance of sharing. The children left their own donations by the altar to be distributed to those in need in the community.

Year 2's have been busy learning about London. They've explored maps, identified famous landmarks and in art have learnt different techniques to draw some of these buildings. They had a fantastic trip into London where they were able to get a birds eye view of many of the landmarks when they went on the London Eye.

Elara enjoyed seeing Big Ben from really high up as it didn’t look as big anymore. Daria said she really liked being able to see Buckingham Palace and wanted to know if the new King was there.

What an exciting end to the term we have had in year 3, the children have settled well into key stage 2 life and are working hard on their learning. More hard work and progress to come!

This term we have been learning about plants in science and have recently visited our local nature reserve, Woodcroft Wildspace. This beautiful oasis among the houses has beehives, minibeasts, many varieties of trees and a pond. The children especially enjoyed pond dipping as there were so many tiny creatures to be discovered and identified, like mayfly larvae, diving beetles and water fleas.

As well as developing our knowledge in science we have also been developing our skills in art. Continuing to look at the work of artist Stephanie Peters and her amazing work related to natural disasters and fire. We have been producing our final outcomes by blending colours and creating textures for our backgrounds before using natural resources to create damaged trees in the foreground. The results have been very effective.

In Year 4, within our Art lessons we have been learning about the famous artist Paul Cezanne. We have been looking at how Paul uses different tones and shading techniques to create a three dimensional effect within his still life pieces. We first created our own shading bar from ‘highlight’ to ‘shadow’ with various midtones in between. Then, we practised using different shading techniques to create a 3D effect. We then experimented with using watercolours to show a range of colour tones by varying the amount of paint and water on our brush. Our artwork shows where the light sources were illuminating an object as well as creating a shadow by the absence of light.

Year 4 have also been busy working collaboratively to build Sukkahs for the Jewish festival of Sukkot. They learnt that Jewish people come together in a Sukkah to have feasts and sleep inside, if the weather is appropriate. They build roofs with natural resources such as branches and leaves in order to have an autumnal theme. This reminds Jewish people of the time, they believe, God provided for the Israelites in the wilderness after they left Egypt.

For DT this half term the year 5’s have been investigating and looking at what the vikings ate. They focused on viking stews and the various ingredients that were available to the vikings for making their stew. Firstly, each of the classes designed a viking stew with some ingredients sourced from our allotment. Then all the children had a chance to make a viking stew using slow cookers.

PGL at Windmill Hill, East Sussex. Throughout the week, the children took part in a range of activities: aeroball, abseiling, climbing, zip wire, trapeze, Jacob’s Ladder, archery, sports and team games, all aboard, campfire, disco and cluedo. Each day they enjoyed a range of delicious foods for breakfast, lunch and dinner as well as consuming lots of ‘healthy’ snacks in their rooms!