Sharing our Stories: 09/02/2024

Beautiful Work This Week

XPG Studios

Have you seen this awesome Instagram page, created to showcase the beautiful work from the 150 (and counting!) artists at XP Gateshead? You can see everything they’ve done and follow them here.

Here are some examples recent work they’ve produced…

Beautiful Curation: Plover School

This week, beautiful work from LKS2’s last Expedition ‘Coming to Doncaster – Why then, why now?’ has been curated outside the school! Be sure to stop and take a look at their work on migration, Roman history and sharing stories!

Beautiful Work in the Community: Earth Emergency

In Autumn 2023, Green Top School’s UKS2 children undertook a learning expedition called Earth Emergency. The guiding question was: How can we help our planet survive? Their beautiful artwork is on display on a shopfront on Fieldside in Thorne.

Top of the Blogs

Beautiful work from Arlo and Daniel @ XP Gateshead

Exploring and Embedding Goldilocks and the three bears @ Norton Infants

Safer Internet Day @ Green Top

Crew RPU/ABT getting SLC ready @ XP

We Can Collaborate! @ Plover

Crew Rashford sharing the love @ XP East

Fun in the snow @ Carcroft School

Ponder, Persevere, Practice but never Procrastinate @ Norton Juniors

We’re looking for great teachers at XP Gateshead!

The next 65 seconds could change your life…

If you are a teacher looking for a model of schooling that dares to break the mould, then this might just be for you. There is now the opportunity of a lifetime to teach at the newest of our extraordinary schools, XP Gateshead.

Find out more and apply here to #JoinOurCrew

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!

Handa’s Bananas 🍌

Our experience lesson today was totally bananas!
We are exploring the book Handa’s Surprise and in the story fruit is taken out of her basket as she walks to her friends house. A cheeky monkey swings down from a tree and steals a yellow banana without Handa knowing. Once we had made out bananas we walked around school balancing them on our heads. We were on the lookout for monkeys but luckily we didn’t spot any this time!

RE in Crew MI

In today’s lesson, we learnt more about worship but focussed on the differences between Anglican and Baptist churches. We watched a couple of videos and then sorted features to match the churches. We then drew pictures to represent what we had learnt.

Crew MW – PE ⚽️🏀👟

This week we have been looking at ball skills, in particular dribbling. We talked about what dribbling is and how it gives you more control over the ball. We practised this by working with a partner to dribble the ball towards each other, making sure that we were keeping it controlled as we moved.

We then played a game where half of the crew had to stand with their legs apart (this made a rainbow) and the other half of the crew had to dribble the ball (the sun) around the hall. As we were dribbling the ball, we had to carefully direct the ball through the rainbows to try and score as many points as possible. We showed really good control of the ball during this game!

Crew MW – Music 🎶🥁

This week we have continued with our music learning by practising the song ‘Shake My Sillies Out’. We made sure we included the actions we had looked at in the previous lesson and continued thinking about how we keep in time with the beat of the track. We did a great job of this!

We then talked about how you can use instruments to keep the beat and so we chose an untuned percussion instrument from the box and practised at playing the beat, being sure to keep in time with each other. We worked extremely well as a crew and it sounded wonderful!

Crew MW – Music 🎶🥁

We have been looking at a song called ‘Shake My Sillies Out’. We have been practising warming our voices up whilst building our beat-finding skills by singing ‘Jelly On A Plate’, adding a new verse called ‘Ghostie In The House’. We had to make sure we were staying in time with each other and only clapping on the right beat, not on every word.

Once we were warmed up, we then started by learning the lyrics to ‘Shake My Sillies Out’ before adding in some actions to help with our performance. It was really tricky because we had to remember to do our actions on the correct beat so that we were all doing them at the same time. We worked hard at it though and we followed instructions so that we all ended up doing them at the right time together!