Sharing our Stories: 22/01/2024

22nd January 2024Geoff Hewitt

Beautiful Work This Week

XP Festival of Learning

On Friday, staff across our Trust gathered to launch the first phase of our exciting new Teaching and Learning model, with a focus on our culture of Crew, underpinning principles, deliberate & intentional teaching/learning behaviours at its heart…

Staff from our secondaries and primaries grappled with this exciting new model and took part in a wide range of workshops to develop teaching and learning at XP.

More on this next week…

Carcroft School: How Could We Help Our Planet Survive?

In Autumn 2023, Years 5 and 6 completed an expedition looking at the impact we are having on the planet and what we could do to make a difference now and for future generations. They held their presentation of learning last week!

Their final product for this expedition was a picture frame made from sustainably-sourced materials. Students then chose their favourite piece of writing from across the expedition to publish in the frame alongside (or behind) a simple piece of artwork reflecting elements of our learning. Beautiful work!

Top of the Blogs

Delicious Recycling @ Norton Infants

Crew Oldridge’s Experiments @ Green Top

Weekly update for families @ XP Gateshead

XP Outdoors – Mindfulness Walk @ XP

Future Architects? @ Plover

Life Skills in LOOL @ XP East

Crew Challenge @ Carcroft School

Problem Solving – Square Numbers @ Norton Juniors

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!

Timetables

21st January 2024Ruth Shields

Last week, we got our focus solely on our timetables and ensure we are secure with all of them. This year we’ll have the MTC so it’s important that we’re ready for it.

The children volunteered to lead chanting the timetables. We talked about the importance of saying the full number sentence rather than just the answers.

Crew Challenge

21st January 2024Ruth Shields

Our crew Challenge was to use a range of gestures to help people decide which card they had. Each person was given a card and you had to treat people based on the value of their card. After having time to greet each other, they then had to decide if they had a low, middle or high value card. Once they’d decided they could finally look at their card. Most children were able to guess the value of their card as some children bowed to them, waved or give them a thumbs up/down.

We discussed how there will be occasions when we don’t have to say anything because our body language will do all the talking.

Recycling

18th January 2024Ruth Shields

Yesterday we were lucky enough to have Doncaster council come in and give a presentation ahead of our visit to the recycling centre. The talk was very informative before children were given the opportunity to decide which bin certain pieces of rubbish would go in. I certainly learnt a thing or 2 as I’ve been putting some items in the wrong bin.

Sorting Sentence Types

18th January 2024Laura Hamill

This afternoon, Crew Hamill’s grammar focused on sorting sentences into their different sentence types – commands, statements, questions and exclamations. We found questions much easier because we knew they ended with a question mark ❓ but we managed to sort them all correctly!

We are Geographers 🗺️ 🌍 🧭

18th January 2024Laura Hamill

Crew Hamill began their expedition with their first geography lesson this afternoon. We were able to use atlas to identify where Doncaster was on a map and investigate the human and physical features. We then labelled a map of the United Kingdom , focusing on the main cities and towns around Doncaster.

Measurement Madness 📏

18th January 2024Laura Hamill

Today, Crew Hamill completed a practical maths lesson that involved measuring in centimetres and millimetres. We had to be VERY accurate with our measuring skills to make sure we got the exact measurements of things (e.g. a glue stick is 11cm 4mm long!) we then had to go around the room, measuring as many object as we could, sorting them into a table based on their measurements!