Nursery & Reception refurb, 2023

We gave £3,000 to the school to buy new toys and equipment for the Nursery/Reception area.

We also spent nearly £2,000 on new flip charts & paper for each year group:

Traverse climbing wall & mural, 2023

In summer 2023 we installed a new mural and climbing wall in the school’s main playground. Here’s what it looked like before:

And here’s the wall now:

This project cost us £4,500 and has totally tranformed the KS2 playground. We hope to inject more colour very soon, and get the parents involved to help paint the adjoining toilet block in matching colours and shape.

New library, 2023

The dangerous stairway leading up to the old library meant it could not be used safely by children and teachers. So FROGS helped move it into a new space (a former office) at the heart of the school. Here’s what it look like now:

Garden Classroom, 2022

This project involved installing an outdoor classroom in the garden. It is large enough to be used by an entire class for outdoor lessons or forest school type activities. This cost us just under £9,000, and we used our funds plus a £500 Tesco Community grant to pay for it. Here’s the work in progress:

And what it looks like now:

We’re not quite finished with the garden, we’re going to revive the beds, buy some new sheds and install some music and water walls.

Church Walk mural, 2021

The main entrance to the school has been relocated to Church Walk quite recently to help with pollution and congestion issues on Albion Road. Thanks to local graphic design studio Rude, we have transformed this area into a bright and colourful place, which clearly signposts that this is an entrance to a primary school. Here’s what it looked like before:

And here it is now, bright and colourful:

We spent £1,750 of our budget to pay for this, and we couldn’t have done it without the help of Rude Studio and our parent volunteers.

Greening up Grasmere, 2021

We’ve completed Phase 1 of our plan to green up the playgrounds, by buying some colourful Rainbow trugs and filling them with plants.

KS1 Playground mural, 2021

Artist Ivana Zorn has just completed a second mural for the school, on a long wall of the Key Stage 1 playground. Its theme is a celebration of togetherness, sharing love and laughter, and clapping to encourage and support others. Full of energy and colour, its aim is encourages the imagination – is it a seesaw, is it a smile, a hug?

Here’s how the space looked like before:

And here’s what it looks like now, completely transformed by Ivana’s mural:

Santa’s visit, 2020

This year we weren’t able to organise the school’s traditional Winter Fair and Christmas grotto, so instead, we asked for donations to plan a little Christmas event for the school. The parents were incredibly generous, and we raised just over £1,800.

This money was used to buy an all-important Santa costume and prepare 217 age-appropriate gift boxes for the Grasmere schoolchildren. Each box featured different items selected for the different age groups – though everone received a lovely Rudolph hot chocolate kit.

The remaining £600 were divided in £20 gift vouchers, which were distributed by the school to the 30 families they had deemed most in need this Christmas.

The FROGS’ team of elf spent days shopping for the perfect presents, filling the boxes, and printing the colouring pages. Super-elf Jinglebells single-handedly decorated the 217 boxes, a feat neatly matched by super-elf Starrysky, who filled each of the 217 hot chocolate kits.

The Grasmere Cookbook, 2020

In 2020 we published the Grasmere Cookbook (a handful of copies are still available from our shop), a collection of over 50 recipes from our community, including 6 from local restaurants and bakeries The Flying Frenchman, Luminary Bakery, Belle Époque, Perilla, The Clarence Tavern and Tranga.

Recipes from Grasmere families and staff include pakoras, jerk chicken, dahl, corn fritters and desserts such as lamingtons and brownies.

The print version is a full colour 116-page A5 paperback with photographs accompanying most of the recipes, and the cookbook is also available as a PDF.

Here are a few pages to whet your appetite!

We’ve also had some colourful tea towels printed to sell on the online shop:

Quiet playground, 2020

We cleared out some old sheds behind the main hall to turn a small unused area into a quiet outdoor for SEND pupils to enjoy. This is the space before the works:

And look at it now! Designed and decorated by Grasmere parent Julie, the space features a mural by artist Ivana Zorn (a print of which will be soon available on our new online shop – watch this space!) and some colourful matching benches made of 100% recycled plastic.

The patch of artificial grass was recycled from an installation by Kit and Caboodle on Principal Place Park, and the cost of fitting kindly funded by Principal Place Park developers Brookfields. (We wouldn’t have been able to afford it otherwise, as the bill for just fitting the free grass with a shock pad underlay was £2,120).

Grasmere's very own caretaker Billy helped hand-build a fence and gate to secure the area, which we are sure will be much appreciated by the Grasmere kids who really needed a quiet area during break times. The whole project cost us £1,150, with plenty of paint leftover to complete the transformation of the other playgrounds.

Creative room, 2020

We have just turned an old computer room and an adjoining storage room on the school’s first floor into a multifunctional art room. This is the work in progress:

And here is the new creative space and storage room, in which kids will be able to draw and paint, and have music and dance sessions, starting from September 2020:

Computers, 2020

The school had only a very basic IT provision: a room full of old desktop computers with operating systems that could not be updated anymore. Since there was no funding available from the council to buy appropriate equipment, FROGS raised to the challenge. Thanks to our generous parents we managed to raise enough money in 2020 to buy 15 laptops; these arrived just in time for lockdown in Spring 2020. Now stored on a IT trolley, they will be shared by all year groups.

Cuban Music Day, 2020

Musicians Sara McGuinness and Elpidio Caicedo shared their passion for Cuban music with the entire school on a lovely day that finished with the children dancing in a conga line. The event was organised by a Grasmere mum, founder of the Global Music Academy, in March 2020.

KS1 playground, 2019

The KS1 playground featured a very old climbing frame, as well as lots of badly placed play equipment. It also lacked a quiet area and a better border with the nursery area.

Thanks to FROGS’ fundraising, the KS1 playground was completely transformed by MFS Play in June 2019. They installed a new ‘Crow’s Nest Island’ climbing frame, as well as a new fence and wooden huts to separate the nursery playground, and a colourful shelter:

Sensory room, 2019

Thanks to £1,000 of FROGS money, and a small top-up from the school’s SEND budget, in 2019 our team of parents and carers turned an old staff kitchen into a welcoming sensory/medical room:

Hold Up a Light, 2019

Children from the school choir joined Take That’s Mark Owen to sing Hold up a Light, a single written by a Grasmere dad. The charity single launch event was held in April 2019 and created a lot of buzz. Proceeds from sales of the single are partially going to FROGS; it has raised hundreds of pounds for the school.

Garden, 2018

The garden was previously dominated by a large wooden climbing structure that had become too dangerous to use, and offered very little space to actually plant things.

Thanks to FROGS’s planning and funding, and the hard work of volunteers from LendleaseUK and Maylim, the garden area reopened in June 2018 with a new firepit, mud kitchen and kitchen garden.

Library, 2017

Until recently, the school library was a gloomy and underused meeting space filled with outdated computers and books, many dating from the 1980s. The FROGS team worked with the pupils and teachers to create a room that would work for all.

After months of work, Grasmere’s library reopened in June 2017 having undergone an incredible transformation. The project was made possible thanks to FROGS’ team of 40 parent and carer volunteers and fundraisers, who raised more than £4,000 over the summer, and helped with everyting from painting and building custom-made shelves, to sorting books.

The result is a bright and colourful space loved by children, parents and teachers alike: