Sharing our Stories: 16/05/2025

Beautiful Work This Week

Here’s a selection of beautiful work from across the XP Trust from this week. To read about other stories from across the XP Trust, visit xptrust.org.

Top of the Blogs

Block Volcano Art @ Green Top

Innovating the Gingerbread Man @ Plover

Identifying features of a map @ Carcroft School

Activism in action – the second annual public health conference @ XP Gateshead

Seascapes @ Norton Infants

Fully immersed in Wordsworth @ XP

Arts Festival 2025

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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!

Telling the time to one minute

In maths, we consolidated telling the time to the nearest 5 minutes before we moved on to telling the time to the minute. We used the clocks to show the time. We started with showing the minutes past the hour and then moved on to minutes to the hour. We found minutes to tricker, but we persevered and managed to do this by the end of the lesson!

We’re Hiring: Join the Green Top Crew!

We’re looking for two incredible Learning Coaches to join the team at Green Top School!

This is an opportunity to be part of a school where relationships come first, learning is purposeful, and every child is known, supported, and challenged.

You’ll work side by side with teachers to help deliver beautiful, meaningful learning experiences as part of our expeditionary learning curriculum. From Early Years to Key Stage 2, you’ll support children to grow academically, socially and emotionally – helping them become thoughtful, capable, and kind individuals.

Find out more about the roles here: xptrust.org/vacancies

Art continues in Crew MT!

Today, we carried on with our acrylic art pieces. We added more lava to our volcano, added the lava plume and the volcanic ash cloud above the volcano. We persevered with this as adding the cloud was quite tricky! We stippled the paint onto our artwork and then used a sponge to blend it out. We are really enjoying seeing the picture develop as we continue to add more detail!

Exploring acrylic paint in MT

Today we moved onto exploring acrylic paint. This was a real contract to the water colours we had used yesterday. We explored the techniques needed and practised how we paint using this type of medium. We learnt that building layers is important when using acrylic paint and how it adds to texture.

From here we started our first draft of our art work. We used a video clip to help support the steps needed. First of all we used our knowledge on sketching to build the shape of our volcanoes. Then we started to add our paint, using the techniques we had explored earlier in the day. We built the paint up in layers, adding more texture. We used both acrylic paint and acrylic pens. We are really looking forward to finishing our piece tomorrow where we will add more layers along with a smokey effect for the sky.