Book Talk 📚📖🗣🗨

8th December 2023Sophie Elmer

 In today’s Book Talk session, we explored the front cover of our new text to allow us to fully immerse into the text and understand right from the front cover what we might expect from the book. We then read the synopsis that had been written which gave us a little more information and got us really questioning what the text might be about. We also explored some of the pictures from the text as an extra stimulus. We then tried to answer the following questions: What does it remind us of? What do we think it will be about or is going to happen? What do we wonder? And what do we notice? We recorded our responses during a ‘Silent Conversation’ and then shared our comments as a crew.

We ended the session by discussing how important it is to really look at the front cover, picture clues and read the synopsis before selecting a book. This was especially important for this text because lots of our initial responses were that the front cover looked ‘old’, ‘boring’, ‘old fashioned’ and ‘plain’. However, after reading the synopsis and seeing some images from the text lots of us changed our opinion of the text and are now excited to look at it more next lesson! 

Decisions, decisions, decisions… ♱⛪💕

8th December 2023Sophie Elmer

In RE, today we have been thinking about ‘WWJD’ – What Would Jesus Do? We understand that many Christians follow this daily in their practice and even wear jewellery such as bracelets and necklaces to remind them of this, as well as to help them to work out different situations that are tempting or difficult as well as challenging dilemmas.

In Crew Boswell, we discussed why Christians may do this and how it might help them to live their daily lives and make the right choices and avoid temptation. We further discussed how Christians also use resources such as The Bible and Prayer to support them with challenging aspects that appear in day to day life.

We then looked at some different scenarios in groups and thought about the right and wrong thing to do and ultimately What Would Jesus Do (WWJD), what would modern day Christians do and what we would do in each situation. We had some interesting discussions and it certainly made us reflect on our behaviours. At the end of the session pupils shared that they had learnt to ‘think before I act’, ‘treat others as I would want to be treated’, ‘help others in need even if we aren’t friends’, ‘be kind’, ‘do what’s right’. It was a great session and we all learnt something!

Super Scotties session

8th December 2023Kate Thompson

In Scotties this week, we worked on our communication and listening skills. We worked as part of a team to get to the enemy without being seen. We did a great job of this as it did get quite tricky at times remembering who was going next. At the end of the session, we timed each team to see who was the quickest. We can’t wait for the next Scotties session!

All about art 🎨🖌️

8th December 2023Kate Thompson

What a fantastic start to our art slice Crew Thompson have made. We are aiming to use water colour to create a background for our calendars. Today we have made a start on practicing the techniques we are going to be using such as: flat wash, graded wash, wet on wet, splatting and lifting off. It has been really important to practice these skills because we will be using these in our final piece. We are super excited to use these skills in our first draft next week.

Junk Modelling 📦✂️

8th December 2023Eleanor Pashley

This week, we have been practicing our fine motor cutting skills by building and making things out of the big cardboard boxes. The children have enjoyed making superhero outfits and houses. We are going to paint them next week and add different things to improve on them.

Sharing our Stories: 08/12/2023

8th December 2023Geoff Hewitt

Beautiful Work This Week

Green Top EYFS: Exploring our World – beautiful curated work in our community!

Activism at XP Gateshead

Carcroft KS1 Santa Dash!

Green Top UKS2 ‘Earth Emergency’ Presentation of Learning

Top of the Blogs

Class 8 Christmas Jumper Day @ Green Top

Crew Stanton Christmas Movie Night @ XP Gateshead

Festive Friday @ XP

Community Clubs @ Plover

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas @ Norton Juniors

Working Hard in Human! @ XP East

Christmas Dinner @ Carcroft School

Our week in Class 1 so far @ Norton Infants

We’ve got Vacancies at XP Trust!

Visit xptrust.org/vacancies to find out more and apply 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!

We are artist! 🎨🖌️

7th December 2023Ruth Shields

We’ve had a lovely morning in Crew Shields as we explored a new artist and became familiar with the critique norms.

We looked at pieces of art and started to think about praises and wonders for each piece. We also considered the pieces that we liked and the ones we weren’t so keen on. There was a discussion about how people like different styles of art but this is down to personal preferences.

Our new artist is Waltraud Nawratil so we spent some time building up some background knowledge on the artist we’ll be staying out art after.

Then, we recapped some sketching techniques and watched a video on acrylic paint techniques. Crew Shields are excited to get cracking on their first draft tomorrow.