Sharing our Stories: 27/09/2024

27th September 2024Geoff Hewitt

Beautiful Work This Week

Outward Bound 2024: XP Doncaster and XP Gateshead

This year, we were lucky enough to have new Year 7s from both XPD and XPG working closely together at the Ullswater and Howtown Outward Bound centres. As a result, we were able to capture these wonderful highlights of both sets of students building Crew and expressing what it means to be Crew at the end of their week in their first ever presentation of learning.

Beautiful Curation across the XP Trust

More beautiful work has been made public this week – in both Plover and Carcroft School. Look at these awesome selections from final products, now curated for all to see!

XP Trust Crew Away Day @ YWP

Our Heads, Admin, Facilities and Comms Crews came together to further develop positive relationships and build Crew at Yorkshire Wildlife Park. They spent the day exploring Case Studies to improve communication and conceptual understanding around day-to-day crucial aspects of what we do at XP Trust.

The day was extremely positive and productive – thank you to YWP for your hospitality!

Early Years Open Evenings @ Plover

We’ve got vacancies across XP Trust!

Find out more and apply here to #JoinOurCrew

LKS2 Teacher at Plover School

Temporary SEND Learning Coach (TA) at Green Top

Top of the Blogs

Class Six Invade Conisborough Castle @ Norton Infants

Space Oddity @ Green Top

To be or not to be? @ Plover

WW2 Wartime Food in Crew @ Carcroft School

What’s on the horizon? @ XP School

Supporting our local charity @ Norton Juniors

A Published Author @ XP Gateshead

Crew Spencer Mindfulness @ XP East

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!

We were peasants and candlemakers

27th September 2024Nicola Robson

For our second case study we are exploring what life was like in a castle during medieval times. We learn about the Feudal System and how the higher up the feudal system you were the more power and money you had. We began by experiencing life as a peasant by doing lots of hard jobs such as cleaning and sweeping.

For our next job we became candle makers. We talked about how there was no iPads, phones, TVs or electricity in a castle during the 12th Century so children had to find other ways to entertain themselves. No electricity also meant no lights so candles were essential.

I wonder what jobs we will experience next!

WW2 Wartime Food in Crew Godley

26th September 2024Laura Godley

Today we discussed the need for making rations spread further and creating meals from the foods people had available, including those they had grown in the ‘Grow for Victory’ campaign. We explored a range of recipes, looking at the ingredients needed and the method involved. We discussed that as ingredients were rationed, this made the recipes really simple. We worked together to make a wartime foods – carrot cookies, carrot fudge, sweet potato chocolate spread and cauliflower pie. Once we had created our wartime food we discussed how the dishes in WW2 were different to our favourite meals today. The sweet potato chocolate spread certainly didn’t taste as sweet as it does today!

Ordering numbers to 10,000

26th September 2024Laura Hamill

To consolidate our learning on ordering numbers to 10,000, we each became a 4-digit number! To begin with, we were able to choose any 4-digit number we liked but then we were given specific criteria for our numbers. For example, each digit had to have a different value. We then had to order ourselves from smallest to biggest or biggest to smallest, depending on the instruction we were given. We worked really hard to make sure that the value of the person to one side of us was bigger than us and the value of the person to the other side was smaller. We used our maths vocabulary to have a conversation about why we should be in a certain position. For example, “My tens column has a higher value so I have to bie bigger.” Shoutout to Jenson who was able to become the teacher during this lesson and instruct people where they should be going and why! To end our lesson, we were given four 4-digit numbers that we had to order from smallest to biggest on a whiteboard. Miss was very excited when we all managed to complete this independently!

Showing resilience in PE

26th September 2024Laura Godley

Today in PE, we had some really tough team challenges to complete. Our first challenge was to order ourselves in various positions on including our birthdays, height and shoe size, without leaving the bench! Only one person was allowed to communicate which is always a tricky challenge in our crew!

We then moved onto ‘cross the river’ with the same rules applying. I was so impressed with how the children worked together, communicating silently to ensure they achieved their goal.

The Blitz continues in MI

25th September 2024Stacey McClare

Today we continued to explore a range of pictures focusing on The Blitz. Todays activity built on our learning yesterday but allowed us to record some of our own thoughts and ideas. We explored a picture then recorded the things we could see. We used the sentence stem I think… to generate our own ideas then wrote down some of our wonders. We then looked closely at 2 pictures where we summarised what we could see, what we thought was happening and what they made us wonder. From here we compared each picture thinking about similarities and differences.

Rounding in MI

25th September 2024Stacey McClare

We continue to consolidate our place value knowledge during our do now activities. Today we ordered numbers in ascending and descending order. We then looked at a reasoning problem that we unpicked together.

The main part of our lesson looked at rounding to the nearest hundred which we did really well with. Tomorrow, Mrs Ibbotson will consolidate our learning on this before using the lesson to model some reasoning and problem solving questions. We are looking forward to working in mini crews to discuss and solve these problems.