WOODHOUSE GROVE SCHOOL
Spring Term 1, 2024
BOARDING NEWS Half Termly Boarding Newsletter of Woodhouse Grove School
New Sixth Form Building We are delighted to announce that our brand new Sixth Form Building is now complete. We have been welcoming staff and students to view the state-of-the-art building and will showcase it to students this week attending sixth form taster day. The new facility includes more seminar rooms, increased space for individual and collaborative working as well as integrated technology for live streaming. It is designed to feel more professional and to enhance student’s work productivity, as well as providing plenty of areas for socialising.
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Remember Me—Senior Production In November, some of our incredibly talented boarders took part in the Senior School Production, ‘Remember Me’! This was a raw, powerful and emotional collection of scenes, performance poetry and musical performances which showcased the range of talent of our performers with many of the scenes written by the cast themselves!
Winter Immersion Students
Celebrating Burns Night
During this half term we welcomed a number of Chinese immersion students, mostly from Suzhou, Beijing and Shanghai. The students joined our boarding community for one or two weeks and fully experienced life as a boarder at Woodhouse Grove, participating in lessons and co-curricular activities and Burns Night!
Grove’s Resident Piper, Mr Lambert, has been busy celebrating the colourful life of arguably Scotland’s greatest poet, Robbie Burns. Mr Lambert’s annual ‘address to a Haggis’ for our boarders enabled them to witness one of the more quirky aspects of British culture! This year, the haggis was piped in and enjoyed with the traditional neeps and tatties!
One even celebrated her birthday with us and enjoyed cake with her new friends in Miller House. They also enjoyed Miller Wednesday - which was a Scotland-themed quiz in honour of Robbie Burns and had a great Yorkshire day out to Bolton Abbey and the Yorkshire Dales, followed by fish and chips.
Boarders Enterprise Club It was wonderful to see our boarders manning their Enterprise Club stall at the Friends of Woodhouse Grove Christmas Fair. This was part of a challenge set so that students can understand more and experience the challenges faced when running their own business.
Christmas Events at The Grove
Trips Out
Our Miller boarders and the Rev, had a festive evening at the beginning of December, decorating the Chapel ready for Christmas! They were treated to a Ms Evers Hot Chocolate; complete with squirty cream and a tiny gingerbread man for all their hard work.
Miller girls celebrated a wonderful half term with a trip to see Taylor Swift’s film tour!
We have had some lovely Christmas events including the Christmas concert and our Carol service in Chapel and have enjoyed supporting the members of our boarding community who were involved. Thank you to our music team for both of these fantastic events.
Our boarders also enjoyed Clue HQ, an escape rooms venue in Harrogate. They had fun solving the clues in ‘Cell Block C’ and ‘The Dungeon of Doom’ and everyone managed to escape within the hour limit!
The end of term celebrations included their annual Boarding Christmas Ball.
Fond Farewell We said farewell to our one-term boarders at Christmas. They added so much to our Houses, and we’ve so proud having them here at The Grove!
Oxbridge and Healthcare Advice Sport Update Year 12 students interested in applying to Oxbridge or a Healthcare course after sixth form, had an informative presentation about applications and the importance of taking advantage of the Super Curricular Programme.
Leeds City Trips Two recent trips into Leeds city centre saw boarders spending an afternoon before Christmas getting to grips with skating at the ice rink (which was followed by snow at school)! In January, they teamed up to play Junkyard Golf - congratulations to Meloney who won.
Our U19 Netball girls are through to the last 4 in the National Netball Cup and along with our U14 squad have made the National Netball Finals which take place in March. It is great to see 6 Grovian boys involved in the Yorkshire Academy squad this year including two of our boarders.
Battle of The Bands Last week, the McCarthy Theatre witnessed some extraordinary guitar riffs at our annual ‘Battle of the Bands’. Eight student bands, representing Years 7 to 13, took to the stage and performed a range of both well-known and self-written songs. The audience vote resulted in "Bleeding Green" being crowned champions with their excellent performance of "Teenage Dirtbag" by Wheatus. Thanks to our Year 13 Music Technology students who operated all the technology for the evening and to everyone who helped us to raise money for a local children’s charity.