What a lovely morning it was singing Christmas songs with our peers to our parents, carers and loved ones. We really enjoyed our carol concert and came back into crews in such high spirits. Thank you to everyone that joined us this morning and well done to everyone in year 5 and 6 for their great efforts. We are all now feeling very festive 🙂
Today, Y2 have been exploring how and why Jewish people celebrate Shabbat. We discovered that Shabbat is the Jewish Day of Rest. Shabbat happens each week from sunset on Friday to sunset on Saturday. During Shabbat, Jewish people remember the story of creation from the Torah. Jews have a lot of jobs to do on the Friday evening to prepare for Shabbat.
Today we looked at how we plot coordinates and then applied our knowledge to a festive coordinates activity! We really enjoyed this!
In crew marsh we have finished picasso artwork, we have loved choosing different shapes and creating our snowmen in cubism form. We hope you love them as much as we do!
Today in Y1 we started our christmas writing by reading the christmas jollypostman. He firstly delivered a christmas card to baby bear at the three bears house, we therefore decorated our own card for baby bear and then delivered it to their house. We noticed Mummy bear decorating a christmas tree and enjoyed some warm, delicious porridge.
Today we wrote our second plot point continuing our Christmas setting description. We have all really loved this piece of writing where we have tried hard to use expanded noun phrases, similes, conjunctions and adverbials across both plot point one and plot point two. Great work MI 🙂
Today in our caring crew we discussed the importance of respectful relationships. We thought about times where others may have not shown respect for us personally and how this made us feel. We then watched a clip all around respect. We stopped the clip at different points and discussed what was happening. We were really shocked with how the clip ended and it really made us think about what had actually happened. We discussed what we would do if we saw things happening in the clip and then thought about times where we had seen others not showing respect. It was great to just voice our ideas and listen to the stories of others. In our debrief we went back to our guiding question of ‘Why should I respect other people?’ we discussed this again, offering our thoughts and opinions. A great crew session 🙂
Charlie and Ates had a great time on Friday helping to paint some fruit for the new KS1 expedition displays. They used sponges to help create texture on the fruit cut outs and we used real images of the fruits to help us choose the right colours and patterns.
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!)
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!
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!
Making Someone Smile at Christmas @ Norton Infants
A Spanish Extravaganza! @ XP Trust
Year 3/4 Presentation of Learning @ Green Top
Jujitsu Success @ XP Gateshead
Crew Pasteur Working Hard @ XP
Bazaar Bonanza at NJS @ Norton Juniors
Our Christmas themed day was a big success @ XP East
Visit xptrust.org/vacancies to find out more and apply to #JoinOurCrew
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!
