Today we talked about how a positive attitude is good for our mental health. We talked about what is a happy mind and what a different that can make to our lives. We spoke about what made us happy. We all agreed that when someone else says something positive that then makes the rest of us happy. We worked together to compose a positive statement to share with the crew. We read some some inspirational quotes and decided which one we liked the best- these helped us with our own. We spoke about how some people can struggle with their mental health and how this then can be difficult to feel happy. To help this, we spoke together about what those people could do like talk to a trusted adult.
This October half term, 9 members of staff from across XP Trust travelled to San Diego to work with the best project based learning teacher in the world – Jeff Robin. Each teacher brought with them a personally crafted exemplar – a tangible product of their passion and planning – to refine and inspire transformative future Expeditions.
Inspired by Jeff’s groundbreaking work at High Tech High, the school that inspired XP, they sought to elevate their teaching through creativity, activism, and lasting legacy. Away from the familiar, they embraced new ideas in a setting that ignited their imagination…
Stay tuned for the full length documentary and story of Jeff Tech High…
I have been so impressed with the children’s resilience with reading this week. We have achieved level gaming and improved our comprehension skills. Leon and Oliver have been working hard in RWI and applying this when reading speedy green words. Great work, Crew Godley!
This week in Crew Tymon we celebrated bonfire night. We explored mixing paints together with our hands to make fire paintings. We also put the fire out in phonics using spray bottles. Using our hand eye coordination to roll a ball to make a beautiful firework picture, we also practiced our cutting and fine motor skills. To end the week we had a sparkle and shine disco, and we showed everyone our best dance moves.
Yesterday KS1 took part in knight training. To begin with we learnt about how knights left home at 7 years old to go to go and live in the castle. At 14 years old they became squires and eventually started their training a 21.
We tried out three activities; jousting through rings, flag toss and shooting bows and arrows.
We’ve had an amazing time this evening at our disco, it was lovely to see all the children practising their best dance moves! We can’t wait for the next one.
This week, Crew Hamill have continued their expedition lessons by focusing on another force – air resistance. We looked at what air resistance is – a type of friction between air and another material – and looked at the impact this had on objects when they fell to the ground. We tested it out by dropping two pieces of paper (one flat and one screwed into a ball) and discussed which one would fall to the ground first. We then discussed why this might have happened. Together, we predicted the ball of paper would fall fastest as it was more dense and had a smaller surface area. We were then introduced to our mission from the National Space Station:
Using our design brief, we worked in pairs to design and create a parachute that could be tested for air resistance. We worked in mini crews to create these and then came together as a whole crew to test them out. We began by ordering the parachutes from biggest to smallest in order to test whether our prediction (that larger parachutes will take longer to fall to the floor as there will be more air resistance) was correct. We found that we were correct – the larger the canopy on the parachute, the longer it took to fall to the ground. However, there was one anomaly with a parachute that had been made with a thicker canopy and this effected the results slightly.
We loved conducting a fair test to investigate! Raza made an excellent scientist by being our constant variable and being the only one to drop each of the parachutes!
On Monday, Crew Hamill moved their grammar to the next stage as they began looking at single-clause sentences. We looked at what a clause was (a group of words that include a subject and a verb) and then used our prior knowledge of identifying subjects and verbs to figure out where our single clause sentences were. We followed our script, identifying the first verb in the sentence. One we had this, we identified the subject of that verb. We repeated this until all our of verbs and subjects had been identified and then asked ourselves when the verb ended so that we could put a full stop as we had a full, independent clause with a subject and a verb. We could the go back and add in capital letters.
The children in Crew Godley have been working collaboratively, learning how to gracefully handle both victories and losses. They’ve shown great teamwork and sportsmanship, supporting each other and celebrating the journey of playing together, regardless of the outcome.
Crew Hamill were working on their team building skills today where they did loop de loop and lilly pads. In loop de loop they all joined hands in a circle and then they had to get the hola hoop round the circle without breaking hands. Then in lilly pad they were split into 2 teams where they had 6 rubber spots and they had to get their team from one side to the other without falling off.
