Building Our Geography Knowlege 🌍

Today, Crew Hamill continued with their expedition by looking at Doncaster and other cities around the United Kingdom, learning more about their human and physical characteristics. We focused on how some of these aspects have changed over time, looking at images of Doncaster and organising them into “old” and “new”. It was so interesting to see how our city has changed over time! Do you recognise some of the older buildings?

How many people in Doncaster?

We continued with our expedition where we looked at a topography maps and what they can show. We learned that Doncaster is between approximately 8-24m above sea level whereas the Peak district is around 400m above sea level.

We estimated the population of the world. Most of us estimated around 7-8 billion.

Next we considered the estimation of London based on the size and population of the other capital cities but unfortunately we were nowhere near for this one. We could imagine there were over 7million people in London.

We looked at different areas around the UK and the population of these areas. To help with our estimation for Doncaster we looked at areas similar in size to this area so we could make realistic estimations. Some great estimations.

Finally, we looked at a range of photos from the past and present of Doncaster. It was interesting to see how much Doncaster has changed over time. There has certainly been an increase in the amount of human features in our local area over the years.

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’.

Timetables

Last week, we got our focus solely on our timetables and ensure we are secure with all of them. This year we’ll have the MTC so it’s important that we’re ready for it.

The children volunteered to lead chanting the timetables. We talked about the importance of saying the full number sentence rather than just the answers.

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.

Sorting Sentence Types

This afternoon, Crew Hamill’s grammar focused on sorting sentences into their different sentence types – commands, statements, questions and exclamations. We found questions much easier because we knew they ended with a question mark ❓ but we managed to sort them all correctly!

We are Geographers 🗺️ 🌍 🧭

Crew Hamill began their expedition with their first geography lesson this afternoon. We were able to use atlas to identify where Doncaster was on a map and investigate the human and physical features. We then labelled a map of the United Kingdom , focusing on the main cities and towns around Doncaster.