Crew MW spent today creating their final Christmas cards! We used our first drafts to think about what we liked and what we wanted to change. After that, we drew our wire using pencil, then went over it with a black line, mixed our colours and then printed them using our fingers to create the lights. We think that our work looks beautiful!
In Autumn 2023, Year 5 and 6 across the trust embarked on an expedition with the guiding question: Why should we help our planet survive?
As part of the Expedition, students created their own soft toys based on a chosen animal from the Amazon rainforest – learning about why it is endangered and what we can do to protect the species. The students used ‘The Great Kapok Tree’ as a model text. The pupils wrote their own version of the story through rainforest animals’ eyes for younger children in the form of a book and shared them with Year 2 pupils (along with the soft toys) with the purpose of teaching them about deforestation and its impact.
In the Autumn term of 2023 students at XP Gateshead studied an expedition called ‘From the ground up’ with the guiding question “What do the communities of the North-East of England owe to the miners?”. They presented their learning from this Expedition on Monday at St Mary’s church – sharing their story and performing the songs they have written to tell the stories of the mining community.
These songs will be recorded in New Year and a CD will be produced!
As part of the presentation, students unveiled a board full of their beautiful work – including narrative accounts, diary entries and artwork relating to the Felling Pit disaster.
The chosen venue for the presentation was also historically significant. Not only is St Mary’s the site of a memorial to the disaster and those who lost their lives, but it is also the final resting place of Thomas Hepburn – the famous miner, Trade Union leader and advocate of better working conditions for miners. The building that XP Gateshead is now based in was once named after him.
We were deeply saddened across the XP Trust to hear about the death of Sir Tim Brighouse on 15th December.
Sir Tim was considered to be one of the most important voices and thinkers in education, and a great champion of state schools.
We were very fortunate to be able to welcome him to XP on a couple of occasions and to hear him speak about our school with warmth and encouragement.
He has left a legacy of equity and advocacy for education for all and we are very proud that he is part of our story.
Rail City Launch @ Doncaster Free Press
Enjoying Christmas Lunch in our festive clothes! @ Norton Infants
Crew Spetch Christmas Fun @ Green Top
Weekly update for families @ XP Gateshead
There’s s’more from XP Outdoors @ XP
Primary School Christmas Musical @ Norton Juniors
E28 Crew Malala Roundup @ 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!
Crew MW spent time today looking at our first drafts for our Christmas cards. We had a look at the example and began using our critique to talk about it…We noticed that our example had lots of bright colours in, but we wondered if our cards could include some of favourite colours.
After we had talked about what we were going to create, we begun our first drafts. We started by drawing our twirly wire for the lights, and then mixed our colours and used our fingers to print the lights onto the wire.
Once our first drafts were completed, we used a gallery walk to have a look at each others. We loved giving each other praises about our beautiful work and we loved talking about what we would do differently when we make our cards.
Today we have made festive bookmarks to use over the Christmas Holidays in our favourite books 📚
I made a little snowman,
I made him just like that!
The sun came out and melted him,
And now my snowman’s flat!
A fun maths session had by all! The teachers may have enjoyed it as much as the children…
In our final arithmetic assessment of the term we finally had our first 40/40! We have so many children now in the 30s and close to also achieving 40. Y6 keep smashing it and making us proud!
Today the children have taken home their Christmas calendars. We have drafted and redrafted the work as we’ve gone along and started to show some improvement with our painting skills. As a crew, we have discussed that with more time, we could have improved them even more but we were happy with the progress we’d made so far and hope to continue to develop our painting skills. Well done Crew Shields for your perseverance and resilience.
WOW! 🌟 I am blown away by the effort Crew Thompson have put in to their artwork! It has took weeks of hard work to get to this but we have preserved to complete it to the best of own ability! We are so proud of ourselves!!!
