Learning about Hanukkah in KS1

Today, we continued to focus on Judaism. We were given some photos and completed a gallery walk to think about what we notice and what wonders we had.

We watched some videos to understand how Jewish people celebrate Hanukkah. We learned that they have specific food like potato cakes and doughnuts and most children receive toys called dreidls. Next week, we will design our own menorah.

If it’s good enough for our children…..

Staff do crew too! At XP, we always say, if it’s good enough for the children, it’s good enough for us.  

Therefore, just like our pupils, staff also take part in staff crew events. Yesterday staff had to work with small crews they don’t often work with to complete the ‘Great British Bake Off’. The challenge was to produce Mary Berry standards cakes whilst also decorating and presenting their beautiful work. It was a challenge in just 60 minutes!

I’m sure you’ll agree that there were some wonderful creations which the children enjoyed exploring too!


In 1st place was ‘The Gruffalo’ followed by ‘Wonka’ in second place and in third, ‘Mary Beary’.

Crew Challenge

Our crew Challenge was to use a range of gestures to help people decide which card they had. Each person was given a card and you had to treat people based on the value of their card. After having time to greet each other, they then had to decide if they had a low, middle or high value card. Once they’d decided they could finally look at their card. Most children were able to guess the value of their card as some children bowed to them, waved or give them a thumbs up/down.

We discussed how there will be occasions when we don’t have to say anything because our body language will do all the talking.

We are Geographers 🌎

Today in our expeditionary work we explored the UK and the physical and human features of a village, town and city. The children compared the geographical features and explained how and why these differed. This led to some beautiful discussions around the children’s experiences – especially those children that had visited London. The difference between Doncaster and London city, particularly the difference in population and the transport.
Aubree and Lily-Rose produced some beautiful work which we were so proud of, carefully explains the differences between human and physical features. They were defining working hard, to get smart!

Counting to a hundred 🧮

This week, Crew Godley have started their new unit in maths, place value to 100. The children showed they were able to apply what they already knew about the number system to complete some tricky number lines. We had to think carefully if the numbers were increasing or decreasing in size ⬇️⬆️

Orienteering 🧭

Yesterday afternoon, we braved the cold to go on an adventure. We had to use a series of instructions to guide us around the playground where we found some clues. When we returned to class, we worked together to figure out what they said. When we had finished, we discovered that the clues made up the guiding question.

Passover 🍲

Today, Y2 explored Passover which is one of the most important festivals in the Jewish year. It is celebrated in Spring. We discovered that story of Passover is in the the Torah, which we looked at last week. During Passover, Jewish people remember how the Israelite people were freed from slavery by Moses over 3000 years ago. Passover is celebrated for seven or eight days. The night before passover begins, there is a special service called Seder. At the Seder meal there is a special Seder plate on the table. The Seder plate is an important part of the Seder meal, this plate has five sections to hold some special Seder foods. We created our own Seder plates to share with our grown ups at home, explains the importance of the food shared on the Seder plate.



We are mathematicians 🧮

Today in Crew Godley we’ve been working hard to complete missing number addition in our magic maths session. We found this really tricky last week however the crew have blown me away today, showing they are getting smart by using our number facts to complete their number sentences independently.