Chapter One Celebrations!

19th July 2024Sophie Elmer

This year, as a school, we have taken part in Chapter One.This has meant that many of our pupils in KS1 have had the opportunity to read 1:1 with a volunteer at least once a week for the whole year, that’s reading at least a whopping 40 times this year! Not only has this reading opportunity supported our pupils to develop their reading skills and better their fluency it has also boosted their love of reading! All of the pupils that have taken part in this have made fantastic progress with some now reaching the top book band level! We are super proud of them all! Yesterday, we got to take part in a live call with our Chapter One representative, as well as many of the volunteers that have been reading with our pupils. It was lovely for us all to put a face to people, as well as listen to the lovely feedback that our volunteers shared. It was such a lovely moment to share with our pupils, and the great news is there will be much more of this in the next academic year!

Reading Challenge Golden Ticket Winners

18th July 2024Laura Hamill

A HUGE shoutout to Luke and Zach who earned themselves a golden ticket in our reading challenge from this term. Each of them has read every single day at home to move up on our challenge board. They even started to overlap some of the other children in crew showing just how much they have read! I am so proud of your enthusiasm with this challenge boys and I praise your efforts in making sure you have read at home every night. I hope you love your prizes!

Y1 tile artwork

17th July 2024Lauren Marsh

To celebrate the end of our Islam learning we created an Islamic artwork tile using dots and lines. We did this through learning about the artist William Morris who designs lots of patterned artwork for wallpapers.

Schools Catering Price Increase across XP Trust

17th July 2024Miss C Blair

Dear parents,

We have recently received next year’s prices from our current catering providers, Doncaster Council Schools Catering Service.

Due to rising food and labour costs, they have significantly increased the price to all of our schools across the Trust. 

Even with the schools heavily subsidising this, we may still need to increase the cost per meal for parents to £3.00. We are greatly disappointed to ask this of our parents, but this is a decision we have had to make due to reasons out of our control. 

We will continue to work with Schools Catering over the summer holidays to try and bring these costs down, whilst ensuring a high quality meal will be provided to each of our students. We will keep parents informed with any updates on this.

We are exploring other providers, and if necessary, we will look to change providers if a more cost effective offer is available elsewhere.

We will do everything we can to keep the price of school meals affordable to our parents, but we wanted to provide early warning that our prices are likely to increase from September 2024.

LKS2 Presentation of Learning

17th July 2024Laura Hamill

This morning, LKS2 were joined by lots of their adults to take part in a presentation of the learning we have done throughout our most recent expedition entitled ‘From Bean to Bar’ with the guiding question, ‘What is the Cost of a Bar of Chocolate?’

We began our presentation by sharing the narrative of our expedition, explaining each of our case studies (History, Science and DT) and the rationale behind each of these. We then worked in mini crews to demonstrate some of our favourite activities from throughout the expedition: Mayan mask making and timeline work from our History case study, a viscosity experiment and solids, liquids and gases sorting from our Science case study and a fresh vs processed food sorting activity from our DT case study. We also took part in a Kahoot quiz to test our overall sticky knowledge on the Mayans!

Once everybody had explored the different activities, they were all given the opportunity to sample some of the Mayan inspired recipes we have worked on during our DT case study – tuna, avocado and salad wraps for starter, a sweet potato and polenta bake for main and some chocolate and chilli cupcakes for dessert! We even treated everyone to a traditional Mayan drink – hot chocolate (with a twist as it was made with real cacao powder and had a hint of chilli!)

We ended our presentation of learning with our adults taking home our final product – some delicious chocolate and chilli cupcakes that were designed, baked and boxed by our very own hands! We had so much fun with our adults and received lots of wonderful parent and pupil voice from the event. Thank you again to everyone who has attended!