Sharing our Stories: 03/05/2024

Beautiful Work This Week

We’re celebrating EL’s #BetterWorldDay at XP Trust!

Better World Day is EL Education’s annual event showcasing student learning that contributes to a better world. Students work in partnership with each other and their local communities on this day to engage in and celebrate meaningful student work that positively impacts the world around them.

As a partner and friend of the EL Schools Network, XP Trust contributes to this every year. Like students at EL, all of our students are active citizens who engage in acts of service to their community – so naturally we have lots of Activism to share with the EL Crew.

This year, we’re celebrating all of our schools and their collective work. They’ve planted trees, created artwork for hospitals and raised money for worthy causes. Here’s just a few examples from this year of XP Schools making the world a better place.

Visitors from Northern Ireland!

Last week we welcomed a delegation from Catalyst Schools, an organisation in Northern Ireland that supports school leaders and teachers by exposing them to innovative educational experiences. Over the visit, they learned all about Crew and Expeditions from our awesome students at XP and XP East – including going to see world from across the Trust in Doncaster City Centre. As always we are delighted to welcome visitors into our Crew and share the beautiful work our students do every single day with the world.

Top of the Blogs

Weekly Update for Families @ XP Gateshead

Rockpool Magic @ Norton Infants

Mayans and Chocolate @ Green Top

Expert Artist @ Plover

Drawing Pictograms @ Carcroft School

Share your stories with us!

We now have a new dedicated news email so that you can send your stories, updates or ideas about potential news articles directly to us in Comms.

It might be something you or your students have achieved, a charity you’re supporting or anything at all that deserves a wider audience.

Write to us at [email protected] –  we want to hear about it, write about it and celebrate it!

Diverse Doncaster – Exploring Christianity

This week Crew Robson have loved starting their first case study all about Christianity.

To begin with we explored what historians are and how they use primary and secondary sources to find out information about that past. We learnt that photographs, weapons and clothes are primary sources whereas newspapers and documentaries are secondary sources.

We then looked closer at what religion is.

Did you know…

In Doncaster, half of the population are Christians (51%)
Christianity is the largest religious group. This is 156,747 people

For our next two lessons we explored why God is important to Christians and what they believe God is like. We have had some fantastic discussions and I have been amazed by the questions they have been asking.

Scotties

In our Scotties session this week, Mick really worked us hard to make sure we saved the castle. We had to do a variety of different exercises before we got there. We were tired by the end of the session but it was good to move our bodies and work our muscles.

Rounders

In PE today, we continued to work on our skills needed for rounders. First, we warmed up by practicing our underarm throw. We remembered that we had to step forward with our opposite leg so we are balanced. We had to make sure we were ready to catch the ball by looking at our partner with our hands out ready. Then, we did the exact same but practicing the overarm throw. Again, we had to use the opposite foot when setting forward and make sure our throwing elbow was in line with our shoulder. We then discussed what a “no-ball” is in rounders. The umpire calls no-ball when the bowler bowls the ball too high (above the head), too low (below the knee) too wide (out of the batting square) or too close (no ball body). We then had a mini game to put all the skills into practice. We had a bowler, batter, back stop, umpire and some fielders. We really enjoyed todays PE lesson and can’t wait to continue to practice these skills next week.

Debugging!

In our latest computing session we learnt all about what debugging is (which doesn’t actually have anything to do with real life bugs!), how we identify them in an algorithm and how we can fix them! We then had a go at doing some ‘debugging’ ourselves. We worked in pairs and used maps and directions to spot the ‘bug’. We were really good at this! As a crew we then had a go at rewriting the correct algorithm. We then finished the lesson by sharing everything that we had learnt about ‘debugging’!

Drawing Challenge

This morning in Crew we discussed having a positive attitude even when things are tricky. We talked about how we all find different things hard and for some of us this is drawing. We had a go and following a how to draw video and practiced showing perseverance!

Getting Smart in Nursery

Today, in nursery, we looked at different sea shells and described how they felt. The children came up with lots of good adjectives like, bumpy, smooth, soft, hard, rough, spikey and white.

We also have been learning about number 1 and practicing our number formation in maths. We are getting smart at recognising numeral 1 and objects by themselves.