Today we had our smelly socks our in our crew challenge! Our challenge was to create a ‘Leaning Tower of Feetza’. It was such a pleasure to see the children collaborating independently and being resilient when our towers tumbled!
Crew Challenge
Year 6 Residential 2024
Here is a video snippet of last week’s adventure! Scan the QR code to check it out!
Handwriting Focus
Crew Hamill have worked extremely hard over the last two weeks to improve their handwriting. On Friday, we stripped things right back to focusing on each letter of the alphabet and how to write this cursively. We then worked through handwriting sheets that had been made on the yellow lines we use to support our writing in writing lessons. Miss Hamill also gave us a set of these sheets to take home for homework so that we have even more practise of cursive!
Analogue to Digital
Following our success with reading time on an analogue clock, Crew Hamill moved on to look at digital clocks. We discussed how we could find these in lots of places – on some watches, our phones, microwaves, ovens… We then looked at how to read a digital clock properly and what each of the digits means. Following this, we used our new knowledge to correctly match analogue clocks to digital clocks as well as the time in words.
Veruca Poem – Demonstration Comprehension
On Friday, Crew Hamill started their demo comp lesson by finding our vocabulary words from around the room and matching them to a sheet of definitions. We then worked as a crew to answer a guided demonstration question which was also focused on vocabulary. Following this, we used the skills we had learned in the guided question to work in pairs to answer two questions independently.
Ofsted Inspection
Hooked on Books
In Y6 our text this half term in One Thousand and One Arabian Nights. We have thoroughly enjoyed reading this text so far and are invested in the story plot.
In our recent demonstration comprehension lesson, we thought back to what we read last lesson using connections or what we’ve already read, explained why we thought that. Before we started reading today we went back to our own targets when reading aloud. We recapped that fluency is the ability to read, write or speak at a comfortable pace without undue hesitation which could impact on meaning or understanding. We explained why punctuation is important – builds fluency with appropriate pauses and breaths – if you stop in the right places, the text makes more sense. Also, Intonation is the rising a lowering of our pitch. It helps us not to sound like a robot and can support meaning. For example, our voices should raise when we are asking a question – it’s how we can identify questions without question marks when we talk to other people. it’s important to learn what it is and how to use it properly to help our reading and comprehension. If we don’t know how to pronounce a word, we can check if it’s a proper noun (do we need to pronounce it correctly?), segment and blend the sounds (does it follow a spelling rule), try to recognise any prefixes/suffixes/root words that we recognise how to pronounce or simply ask a buddy. Lastly we looked at reading with expression means reading aloud with feeling.
Violet Beauregarde Book Talk
This week, Crew Hamill have continued their poetry focus by looking at a poem about Violet Beauregarde from Charlie and The Chocolate Factory. This helped us to compare and contrast her character to Augustus Gloop who we looked at last week. Our fluency focus this week has been on accuracy – ensuring we are following the text properly. We magpied some brilliant reading ideas from Crew Shields and Crew MI to help us with this. We learned how to use our rulers to move from line to line in the text, ensuring we didn’t miss any out which would impact on how fluently we read (thanks, Crew Shields!). We also accurately followed the individual words with our fingers which allowed us to keep up with where we were in the text (thanks, Crew MI!) After reading through the text several times, we have looked at answering questions with Miss Hamill and in Talk Partners. Our focus this week has been on vocabulary in order to prepare us for our assessments next week!
Special trip to the park
Because Y1 have worked so hard in our phonics screening tests, we got a great treat and got to go to the park! Miss Welburn also kindly brought us in some sweets.
Sharing our Stories: 14/06/2024
Beautiful Work This Week
XP Gateshead Students Shine as Digital Leaders in Exciting Expeditions Project
Students at XP Gateshead are stepping up in a big way as Digital Leaders, diving into the world of technology to record content for their Expeditions. Teaming up with the XP Trust Comms Crew, these young tech enthusiasts are taking on the role of professional sound technicians. They’re not just learning the ropes of audio recording and editing – they’re skilfully mastering them, gaining hands-on experience that goes beyond the classroom and reaching into real-world applications.
It was so inspiring to see these students get stuck in and take charge of such an important project. Across our Trust, students are constantly proving that with enthusiasm and dedication, they can achieve anything. A massive appreciation to these Digital Leaders for going above and beyond!
A Decade of Activism – New Beautiful Work in Frenchgate Centre
A new curation of recent beautiful work has been installed in the Frenchgate Centre in Doncaster City Centre! There’s awesome work from schools across our Trust, with a key focus on our Curriculum seam ‘Protecting our Planet’ – be sure to go and see the awesome work our students have created!
We’re got vacancies across XP Trust!
We’re looking for:
Learning Coaches at Carcroft School
An EYFS/KS1 Specialist SEND Teacher at Carcroft School
A Teacher at Norton Junior School
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