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

Class 1’s Seascapes…

Last week, our story ‘The Little Mermaid’ took us under the sea. We decided to create some beautiful paintings of the sea. We used powder paints and took our time to mix different shades of blue. The children enjoyed completing this task and they worked conscientiously, taking their time, which resulted in work to be proud of!

Mindful Monday

Today in our “Mindful Monday” Crew the children checked in with their zones of regulation to see how everyone was feeling, using our monsters to identify and name their emotions. We then took turns with a partner to draw something which happened during their weekend on whiteboards. I was amazed by some of the beautiful drawings in our crew circles, with the majority of children now using lines and circles with a clearer vision of their representations.

The children then took turns to talk about what they had been doing during the weekend with their partner and then recall this to other Crew members. The drawings really helped to bring their recounts to life and both Crews were very respectful of each other whilst they shared their stories. Well Done Crew Winkley and Crew Mortimer!

Castles fit for a future Princess.

Thinking back to last week as we continue with our current case study; “Where in the world will this story take you?” The week began with a visit from a special owl, who dropped by with some postcard clues, which had photos of various castles and palaces from around the world on the front, where our mystery key character “C” may have visited? This helped to hook the children in to our next text Cinderella.

To excite and engage the children further they created beautiful crowns using creative materials during our “Tranquil Tuesday” Crew and off we went on an adventure to a castle to enjoy and immerse ourselves in our new key text, it was very exciting!

The children carefully observed the illustrations in the story and other texts about castles and used the inspiration to shape another piece of beautiful artwork for our final product. They also drew their own castles outdoors in their play and experimented with fairytale castle themed stampers indoors in our painting provision.

In our Maths learning the children explored 2d shapes, thinking about how they look and using words to describe their shape and properties during a dice game. I modelled to the children how they could use the shapes to build/ create a castle. Some of the children copied the examples or my model but most created the most beautiful 2d shape castles and named the shapes they had used, thinking about why they would be useful for certain parts of the building. Here are some examples; “The drawbridge is a rectangle because it’s long and can go up and down” or “These are my pointy roofs, they’re three triangles” and “My windows are circles”. Just look at some of our beautiful work.

EYFS Community Meeting

We had a super start to our day celebrating with our Be Kind, Work Hard and Get Smart stars from Nursery and Reception this week. We heard some fabulous examples of children persevering with tasks and challenging themselves and each other. What a super week, well done to everyone in our Nursery and Reception classes.

Sharing our Stories: 09/05/2025

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

VE Day Celebrations – Moorends Community Centre @ Green Top

F1 are musicians @ Plover

Celebrating beautiful work @ Carcroft School

G28 Fishing Success @ XP Gateshead

Class Five journey to space… @ Norton Infants

VE Day at Norton Campus @ Norton Juniors

Crew Peake tackle the litter @ XP

Netball superfans @ XP East

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!

VE Day Celebrations!

Yesterday Nursery had brief history lessson, learning what VE Day is and why we celebrate it? The children joined the whole school for a special VE Day assembly and we had Crew’s dedicated to the celebrations where the children watched red arrow displays and VE Day parades. We all looked beautiful in our red, white and blue clothing with our lovely flags and home made accessories.

The children enjoyed colouring VE Day posters and celebrating with special red, white, blue buns kindly made by our school cooks – they tasted amazing!

Here are a few of our posters!