Leicestershire Libraries have launched their Summer Reading Challenge for 2024. This year is all about getting CREATIVE. Music, junk-modelling, photography, dancing, story-writing...the possibilities are endless. The Challenge is for children aged 4-12 (although there is a mini Under-4s Challenge too!). Join the Marvellous Makers in Leicestershire Libraries from 6 July to 7 September.

• Go to your library this summer to sign up and get your Marvellous Makers collector’s foldout poster!
• Read books and collect stickers and other rewards for your reading (watch out for the smelly stickers!)
• In Leicestershire Libraries, we encourage children to read 6 books and visit their local library 3 times. At the end, you will receive a certificate with your name on and a medal. Remember, you can read ANYTHING.
• Reading together counts too. It could be a chapter book, picture book, comic, graphic novel, fact book, eBook or audiobook.

There are events on at local libraries throughout the summer too.

For more information click here.

 

Welcome to the Foundation Stage

Creating a positive start to your child's journey at school is crucial. At Woodland Grange we want our children to be active, independent learners from their very first day with us.

• We encourage them to be curious and imaginative.
• We teach them to ask and answer questions — find things out & explain to others.
• We want our children to be aware of the world around them.
• We encourage them to be independent.

Forest School and outdoor learning is a big feature at our school. This helps the children develop their physical skills and core strength, which is vital for everyday life at school and beyond. It also provides many open-ended learning opportunities, which in turn creates team work, problem-solving and allows the imagination to flourish. 

Our PE day is on a Friday- Please all jewellery is removed, including religious bracelets.

Please ensure that children have their waterproofs and wellies in school all year round, as well as a set of spare clothes.

Here is the menu for autumn 2024. As a school we are option 1 & 3, please click here for the menu.

Dates for the Dairy:

The children will begin to attend their allocated part-time starts from Thursday 29th of August.

From the 9th of September, all children will be attending school from 8.45am to 1.30pm (including lunch)

From the 16th of September, all children will be in school full-time.

Transition period:

As the children begin their transition into school, we will be focussing on building new relationships and supporting the children to get used to the new routines they will be involved in at school. 

We have put out a range of activities inside and outside, for the children to enjoy. These activities are based on their interests which have been shared with us during home visits and pre-school visits. 

Some of the things the children can look forward to seeing in the classroom this week and next:

-Train sets

-Barbie world

-Home corner

-Colouring

-Pattern making

-Painting

-Dinosaur world

-Playdough

-Familiar stories

-Sand and water areas

-Building blocks

Hopefully, the children will enjoy engaging in all the exciting provision, enjoying their time at school and begin to settle in well to school life. 

We will also be having a range of short carpet sessions which will focus on getting to know each other, feelings, name games and stories.

We are excited to welcome your children into our engaging learning environment at Woodland Grange, and we wish them a smooth transition into school life. 

 

 

Our website is updated regularly to ensure you are informed about what the children will be learning and exploring at school. Below is an example of what you can expect a typical weekly update to look like once the children are in school full-time. 

Thank you for your on-going support, which we hope will help to ensure the children get the best start to their time at Woodland Grange. 

 

 

 

 

Week Beginning 20th May 2024

Focus Text :The Rainbow Fish  

Phonics

This week we will be having a consolidation week in phonics to enable the children to recap the sounds they have learnt so far this term and support them to apply these to their reading and writing more confidently. We will also continue to consolidate the common exception words covered so far too. 

Maths

This week’s focus is on assessing and deepening the children’s understanding of our counting system. The activities included will help us to check their comprehension, and will provide opportunities for further counting experiences. Now we are fast approaching the end of the year, we will be using our professional judgement to determine whether the children can demonstrate these key skills:

• tagging each object in a group of up to 10 objects (1-to-1 correspondence)
• knowing number names to 10 and their order (stable order principle)
• knowing that the last number counted gives the total in the set (cardinal principle)
• counting up to 10 things that can't be seen or tagged, such as jumps, hops, sounds, etc. (abstraction principle)
• understanding that the quantity remains the same when (up to 10) objects are counted in a different order (order irrelevance principle)
• developing strategies to keep track of what has and has not been counted (e.g. rearranging objects into a line, moving objects as they’re counted)
• recognising the pattern of the counting system, when beginning to count beyond 20.

Counting beyond 20 is an important focus this week. Unlike other languages (e.g. Welsh, Mandarin), English ‘teen’ number names do not follow a logical pattern; we say ‘eleven, twelve, thirteen’ instead of ‘ten-one, ten-two, ten-three’.

It is only when we count beyond 20 that the pattern of our number system begins to become clear. For the children to develop familiarity with the structure and pattern of this system, we need to give them experiences of counting to these larger numbers. The children do not need to remember the names of every ‘tens’ number (thirty, forty, fifty, etc.) but, when prompted, they should be able to rejoin the count because they have understood the pattern of the ‘ones’.

This week’s activities are designed to allow ALL of the children to practise these key skills and to deepen their sense of number.

 

In the classroom you will see...

We will be continuing our text this week, The Rainbow Fish. Now the children have a deeper understanding of our focus text, they will be having a go at writing captions to match the sequence of the story and make their own Rainbow fish books. The children will continue to develop their fine motor skills by using pipettes to squeeze liquid into a range of different containers. The small world area contains blue rice, sea creatures, characters from the text and a range of different sized containers and scoops for children to explore and retell the story. We will continue to explore a range of time adverbials by using sequencing cards for children to determine what comes first, then and next in an event. In the creative area, the children will be using the work of the Artist Paul Klee to inspire them to make their own work of art using chalks. 

Our role-play area will continue to be hairdressers and the beauty salon has been a hit. Children will be taking on different roles, booking appointments and role-playing between hairdressers/ customers in our Woodland Grange hairdressers.  Our recent café has sparked lots of discussions with children visiting local coffee shops with their families, so this week we have transformed it into one of the children's favourites, Jennos!  In this café, children will be designing their own drinks, ordering by size, exploring capacity by making their own drinks, as well as a range of other skills to support their imaginative play. 

 

Other areas of the curriculum....

RE - We will continue to explore one of our focus texts from our 'Everyone's Welcome' unit, The Blue Chameleon. This text looks at making new friends. The children will be completing a range of activities to support this unit throughout the week. 

Music - We will be continuing the unit of Pitch

Topic - Paul Klee- Children will be exploring the work of the artist Paul Klee, learning all about him and his work and having a go at using his pieces to inspire them to make their own. 

PSED - We will continue to think about and discuss the transition to year 1.

PE - To follow instructions and move safely when playing tagging games. In this unit, children will practise and further develop their fundamental movement skills through a range of different themes. Children will learn and develop these skills by playing a variety of games. They will also learn how to work as a team, take turns, keep the score, play against an opponent and play by the rules.