Bishop Auckland, Co Durham
Everyone at Woodland hopes you have had a lovely summer despite the difficult circumstance we are all dealing with. We have had a great couple of few weeks back at school and the children are enjoying being in their new classes and seeing all of their friends. Our new reception starters have settled in well and are already getting used to the school day.
Over the Summer the wildlife camera has been very busy. Lots of rabbits, 3 woodland cats on the prowl, a frequent snuffling from our local hedgehog and 3 very special visitors, fox, stoat and badger!
Just a final goodbye to our wonderful Year 6 pupils Charlotte, Leon, Ruby C, Ruby T, William C and William T.
It has been a pleasure teaching you and we wish you all the very best at Secondary School.
Thank you also for the fantastic support from all the parents over the years.
We hope you enjoyed your final ‘Guard of Honor’
From all the staff and pupils at Woodland Primary School.
Share a Million Stories – World book Day is all about celebrating books and sharing stories. Books are incredible things that allow us to escape from reality for a while and visit a made-up fantasy land.
Join our reading revolution! This year, most schools nationally are participating in a project called Share a Million Stories. On World book day, you are invited to share a million stories and spread the love of books and reading for pleasure. The aim is to read regularly for 10 minutes at a time. Each week the PAL readers (Peer assisted learning readers) will collect the minutes you have read and add it to the school total and then add it to the national total. Happy reading!
On Tuesday 28th of January 2020 Owl Class visited Palace Green Library to learn more about Norman Cornish. We first looked at Norman Cornish sketches and his finished pieces. We compared the sketches to his finished pieces of art and saw how he built up his pieces and how he labelled his sketches to help him. After that we went into an amazing exhibition where we copied some of Normans art work.
After lunch we went upstairs to the Wolfson gallery where we found out about Durham history from the stone age to the Victorian time, we saw a dodo skull and an elephant skull. We talked about the jobs in Palace Green Library and how the library would help us if we were a student at the Durham University. Back in the learning room we did a quiz on Palace Green.
This was a fantastic trip we all enjoyed it and we all would all like to go again.
We’ve had a very busy first half term of 2020 with lots of interesting visitor, visits and activities, it was all topped of this week with snow at Woodland, which the children all really enjoyed!
Today our cook Karen made all the children and staff a lovely Valentines bun which were delicious, thank you Karen xxx
The Apple Tree- Orchestral Performance
In partnership with the Durham Music Service and The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (OAE), the Squirrels watched and participated in ‘The Apple Tree’, featuring soprano Kirsty Hopkins. With lots of opportunities for singing, signing and joining in, it was a lively and interactive event, designed to be accessible to all.
The 45-minute-long performance was broadcast live from Ushaw College and was a fabulous opportunity to introduce the children to the world of orchestral music.
The Children learnt about the changing seasons through a mixture of Baroque and folk music, and met the magnificent instruments of the orchestra. This concert was designed for young children and has received rave reviews. We watched it online along with hundreds of other children, teachers and families across the country.
The broadcast was delivered via YouTube and is available to watch again by all for 6 months, you will find this by searching on YouTube. The performance was a co-production by Orchestras Live, NYMAZ and Durham and Darlington Music Education Hub.
Make a Difference (Rural Isolation Project) – Stay and Play
On Monday 3rd February we held our second Stay and Play for local families and their little ones. This term’s theme was ‘All Things Messy’ providing opportunities for the children to experience sensory play to the fullest!
The Year 6 Play Leaders helped to plan a fun packed afternoon and set up a range of activities including a Slime table, sand tray with letter moulds, Aqua gel beads with water wheels and gel numbers, biscuit decorating, and the popular paint tray and giant paper roll! During planning, the Play leaders were introduced to the Early Years Curriculum and tried to choose activities that would help the children to learn and play.
We had a great turn out of toddlers and families who thoroughly enjoyed getting very messy! Children enjoyed getting fully involved and it wasn’t long before there were hands, feet and at one point, whole bodies in the paint tray!
Once the paint had been washed away, the afternoon was rounded off with refreshments and snacks for some very tired and happy preschoolers.
In Squirrels we have been learning all about how and why Chinese New Year is celebrated. Here are just some of the fun activities we got up to.
We made our own marbled paper to make paper lanterns out of when we learnt about Chinese New Year. We used red and yellow as these are considered colours of good luck in China.
We also made some Chinese dragon puppets too. We had to follow the instructions and cut and stick really carefully.
While we watched a puppet show film about how the order of the animals for Chinese New Year was chosen, we tried some prawn crackers. They are a bit like fishy crisps! They were yummy but we know that they are a snack food and so we can only have them occasionally as they have a lot of fat and salt in them. After this we re-told the story we had learnt about the animals in our Writing books.
We watched a video about how people prepare for, and celebrate, Chinese New Year in Liverpool. We asked and answered questions about what we saw. After this we used a table to find out what animal represents the year we were born in.
We also listened to traditional Chinese music throughout the day and talked about the different instruments we could hear and the sounds we made. On our computers we used a musical editing program to make our own music inspired by the Chinese music we had listened to.
In nursery we worked with Mrs Ord to order the animals in the Chinese New Year video in the order that they won the race by putting our numbers to 12 in order. We worked together to make a big display for the wall. Didn’t we do well?
In Squirrels we have been learning how to use the tie-dye technique to make colourful patterns on fabric. We used blues, whites and purples to represent the cold of winter after learning a song about Jack Frost in music. Next, we will embellish our work with sequins and glitter to represent the frost crystals that Jack Frost paints across the winter landscape.
