This afternoon, we celebrated those learners who are aiming high! Crew White students selected several names of those children that they believed were going above and beyond this week and then we held a secret vote to give postcards to them. Well done you three!
In Crew White, we know that children don’t all learn in exactly the same way. Throughout our classroom, we have lots of simple tools and routines that children can use to help them become more confident and independent learners.
Children can use help cards when they need adult support and brain-break cards when they need a short reset. Personal journals give children a space to organise their thoughts, while movement and fidget resources are available when to help with concentration.
We use visual timetables and timers to make the day and learning clear and predictable. Instructions are broken into manageable steps where needed, and we make sure children have enough thinking and processing time before being expected to respond.
We also regularly revisit previous learning, helping children remember what they have learned and make connections between different lessons. In Maths, helpsheets with key concepts are in their books for them to refer to throughout lessons and there are a number of maths games that we have played which children are encouraged to go back to when they have finished their learning.
Classroom resources are clearly labelled to support with independence and children are encouraged to use the zones of regulation check-in at least every morning and afternoon to support them to notice how they are feeling and why.
An important part of Year 6 is learning what helps you to learn. We want children to become increasingly confident at recognising what they need, choosing the right support and getting themselves ready to learn.
You’ll see some examples in the photos of the different strategies and resources we use every day in Crew White.
Here’s a selection of beautiful work from across the XP Trust!
To read about other stories from across the XP Trust, visit xptrust.org.
]The bog baby @ Norton Infants
Year 4 English Quizzers @ Norton Juniors
Year 11 History: Living under Nazi rule @ XP East
Write to us at [email protected] – we want to hear about it, write about it and celebrate it!
In our Crew Challenge, we were working as a whole crew to listen carefully to follow Miss McGlone’s instructions. We used the parachute as ‘waves’ and made big waves, little waves, and still waves. We then added a ball to the parachute as ‘sea treasure’ and we had to listen carefully and work together to move the ‘waves’ to the size that Miss McGlone called out, all without letting the ‘sea treasure’ roll off! We then added a smaller ball and had to try to keep BOTH pieces of sea treasure on the waves!
We then really tested our listening skills because we had to listen carefully to see if Miss McGlone shouted our name. If she did, we had to swap with the other name that was called before our crew brought the parachute down!
We worked really well together as a crew and we kept all the sea treasure safe! We felt really proud of our crew – great work Crew McGlone!
In Crew Challenge, we had to work in small teams to build the tallest free standing tower. We worked hard in our small sub-crews to try to communicate effectively so that our towers were not only tall, but capable of standing on their own without falling down! We enjoyed this challenge, and in our debrief we were very honest about how we could improve certain things to do this challenge again. We also talked about the things we found tricky, but said that these things were things to help us to do better next time.
In life skills today the children loved working together to make their own cookies
Today, Crew Godley began to bring their ideas from Where’s My Teddy? to life through our own narrative writing. We used our experience from the teddy hunt to help us imagine what it would be like to search for something special that had been lost.
We worked on writing our first plot point, thinking carefully about what happened first, next and finally. We focused on using capital letters and full stops correctly and added interesting adjectives to describe the characters and settings in our stories.
The children produced some beautiful work!
To celebrate an absolutely amazing start to the school year, we have decided to have a little bit of fun on Thursday 1st October.
Children are invited to come to school in their brightest outfits with wacky hair!
The afternoon, will be an afternoon of fun and games!
At lunchtime, Relish have organised a party packed lunch for us to enjoy. All children who have a school dinner on that day will receive a raffle ticket, entering them into a prize draw with prizes to be won!
So proud of these 2 boys handwriting. They have tried so hard since coming back to school after the holidays and their hard work as paid off. Just look at their handwriting from before and now
Today, Crew Godley were introduced to our new writing unit, inspired by the story Where’s My Teddy? by Jez Alborough. We explored how it might feel to lose something special and thought carefully about the different emotions Eddy experiences throughout the story.
We then headed outside into XP Outdoors for our very own teddy hunt! We worked together to search different areas, following clues and using our teamwork skills to help us find the missing teddy. Along the way, we discussed how we felt during our search and imagined how Eddy might have felt as he searched for his teddy in the woods.
This experience helped us to build our understanding of the story, develop our vocabulary around feelings and emotions, and gather ideas that we can use in our writing over the next week
