Today Crew Hamill made baskets from strips of papers and then added their own finishing touches to them. They practiced their weaving techniques and they even helped the rest of their crew if they got stuck. Fantastic crew work today!
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Sharing our Stories 24/01/2025
Beautiful Work This Week
Here’s a selection of beautiful work from across the XP Trust from this week. To read about other stories from across the XP Trust, visit xptrust.org.
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What is Humanism?
In RE last week, we learned about Humanism. We discovered that Humanists don’t believe that God created the world but that we evolved through Science. The world started with a single organism and these continued to multiply and adapt. We discussed what makes humans special and it was lovely to hear the children share their thoughts on this.
Reading Fluency
In reading we have been having a huge focus of prosody(fluency) and ensuring that we are reading a text how it should be read. This has involved lots of echo reading and time to practice reading before answering some questions about the text. It has been great to see some children having the confidence to stand up when it’s their turn to perform. We have also introduced feedback focused on the positives and what we enjoyed from the group reading.
Book Talk
Crew Hamill have LOVED reading this week and it has been so good to see their positive attitudes and active participation during reading. We began by looking at a book that is linked to our current expedition: Black and British. We looked at the cover of the book, as well as the blurb, and had an excellent discussion on what we thought the book might be about, what genre it was and what the purpose of it was. We were excited to learn that it contained lots of real life stories about Black people in Britain and how this had changed the world we live in today. Following this, we focused on one of the stories – Black Americans in Britain – and learned all about 4 amazing Americans who have come to Britain and influenced life for the better. Our favourite was Henry ‘Box’ Brown who mailed himself in a small, wooden box in order to escape slavery! We have worked really hard this week on our automaticity in reading which has tested our ability to read words automatically, without the need for sounding out. We have also focused on our words per minute and have challenged ourselves to hit the Year 6 target of 185 words per minute! Finally, we were split into two groups – one working with Miss Hamill and the other working independently in pairs – to answer some retrieval questions about the book. Miss Hamill was really impressed at our ability to do this accurately!
Compare Mixed Numbers
To help consolidate our understanding of mixed numbers (a number with a whole and a fraction), Crew Hamill worked with cubes to build each of our numbers so that we had visual representations that we could then compare. We found the visual very helpful and this helped us to access our demonstration element of our lesson in which we completed sheets relating to the comparison of mixed numbers in our maths books.
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Animal matching
In expedition, we read a beautiful book called ‘Counting Creatures’. It introduced us to lots of different animals and spoke about their babies whilst also telling us how many babies that animal would typically have. We really enjoyed the book and thought that the pictures and lift up flaps were great!
We used some of the pictures from the book to match the adult animals with their babies. We practised using some new vocabulary such as owlets, tadpoles and caterpillars. We worked extremely hard in our groups to make sure we had matched up each animal to their babies correctly. We noticed that some of the babies looked just like their grown ups only smaller, but some babies did not look like their grown ups at all – they were a little trickier to work out but we showed great resilience in trying to find the right match!
Counting 2
Our new friend number 2 needed our help! He wanted the boys and girls in nursery to help him do his food shopping but before we could, he reminded us that he only liked to buy things in twos. We had to look carefully at the food and make sure that we counted out 2 of the items he had asked for, before putting them into the shopping trolley.
We were all really supportive of each other, and we helped our friends check that they had accurately counted out 2 food items.
Subitising 2
This week in maths, our focus has been the number 2. We started off by talking about what 2 looks like represented as spots and objects arranged as a dice pattern, different patterns and different sizes. We talked about how it was different to 1 because 1 was always by itself whereas 2 was 1 and another 1.
We used this learning to help us create a path for a little kitten who wanted to get from the red counter to the yellow counter. However, the path could only include stepping stones that showed 2! We used our subitising skills to work as a group to decide which stepping stones we could use to create a safe path for the kitten to use to get from one counter to the other.
