For the last two weeks we have been very busy starting our Christmas art work. We looked at lots of different card designs with prints on and decided we would like to try finger printing our own cards for Christmas. We tested out our prints last week and practiced printing along the line in groups using different coloured printing pads. This week we explored colour mixing using red, blue and yellow to make orange, green and purple. Next week, we are going to further improve our work, as we thought we would like to use the colours we had mixed for our final print! We will have three re-drafts when we are finished! Phew! Watch this space our Christmas cards are going to be fantastic!
Our latest Trust publication ‘Rail City’ was launched at the amazing Doncaster Gallery, Library and museum – DGLaM.
The book, an updated and lavishly illustrated compendium of all the work created by students across the Trust, over the last five years, captures our city’s rail heritage – and future.
It is also timely as 2023 is the Flying Scotsman’s Centenary year, the iconic steam engine built here in Doncaster.
Our thanks go to the team at DGLaM and the city council who have facilitated the launch and supported our work across the Trust.
‘Rail City’ will be on sale in DGLaM, the TIC and Waterstones in the Frenchgate Centre. The perfect present for anyone who loves rail, trains and local history. (You can also purchase the book from our online shop!)
Welcome Back!
We continue to welcome delegates from all over the world. Last week our friends and partners from the Wood Foundation in Scotland joined us once again with 25 teachers from schools in the Aberdeen area.
Over two days they looked at Crew, expeditions and the bigger picture of what we do and how we do it.
They even enjoyed a tour of our students’ work in the heart of Doncaster.
Last but not least as you can see from the photograph with their Crew they also joined in with our charity Christmas Jumper day!
A day of music for XP Doncaster Year 7!
Dave Evans ran a series of awesome workshops for our Year 7 students with professional musicians! Our students improvised, created digital beats, sang and played the drums!
KS1 have begun their new unit in RE, exploring who is a Jew and what do they believe? We explored what items were precious to Jews, for example, The Star of David, The Torah and the Menorah. Oliver suggested that the Torah may tell us stories as the bible does. We discovered that Jews only believe in one God, as do Christians.
This week we have started reading the poem “‘Twas the night before Christmas”. The children have really enjoyed looking deeper into this poem and text marking the important information. We have picked out words and phrases that we didn’t understand, for example “visions of sugarplums danced in their head” and “the moon on the breast of the new fallen snow”. We are excited to read the rest of the poem.
In Y1 we have started our art slice and started looking at Picasso who is a famous artist who founded cubism. We loved looking at his art work and thinking about what we liked and disliked. Today we have started to apply some of Picasso’s techniques by capturing our own ideas on a worksheet – we have drawn different shapes for the different parts of a snow mans body.
We then drafted 2 designs to choose from before completing our final design tomorrow and next week. We then voted for the artwork we preferred from design 1 and design 2.
Crew Godley have been working hard on their third draft of their snowmen for our Christmas calendars. You can see just how much they have reflected on their art work and the shapes they have used to create snowmen in the style of Picasso. We can’t wait to see how the final product takes shape!
Here’s a little sneak peek of our third drafts, well done Riley and Jax.
KS1 had a fantastic time yesterday at Campsmount competing in the multi-skills completion. We were so proud of how the children competed, showed resilience and supported their crew. We even got a little gift from the North Pole!
This week, we have started our Christmas art slice. We began by learning about the artist Vincent Van Gough and critiqued some of his most famous pieces. We then explored and tried out different techniques using acrylic paint.
After that, we consolidated our sketching techniques.
With our skills practised, we were ready to begin out first draft of our final piece.
We then did a gallery walk and offered critique to further improve our next draft… but you’ll have to wait for those…
Our crew challenge for this week was to work together in mini crews to complete a jigsaw. We developed our team work skills, communication and listening skills to work together to see which team could complete the jigsaw the fastest. Throughout the challenge, we debriefed to discuss what was working well and what we thought we needed to improve. This helped come up with strategies like sorting the pieces, doing the edges first, each team member trying to complete a different section of the jigsaw to then put together at the end.
Some of us are still finding tying our shoelaces a challenge so Crew Boswell worked with a partner to teach each other how to tie our shoelaces. We had show to show good communication, perseverance and lots of patience. We hope to now be able to teach some of the younger children in our school.
