Sharing our Stories: 20/09/2024

Beautiful Work This Week

Yorkshire Sport Foundation – Opening School Facilities at Plover

Check out this actively awesome video courtesy of Yorkshire Sport Foundation. The children and staff at Plover were superstars in explaining their positive experiences regarding the OSF funding they secured last year, to provide after school and community clubs! Plover have been lucky enough to secure some OSF funding this year too, so watch this space for Community Clubs starting in October! #LovePlover

Beautiful Curation!

We don’t just ensure our work is made public – it needs to live inside our school communities, too! More beautiful work has been curated at Plover School, celebrating their ‘Pride of Plover’ award winners and recent Expedition products!

‘If we get staff Crew right, we get everything right…’

One of our great friends and mentors, Ron Berger, once said to us that ‘staff culture can never outpace student culture.’ With this firmly at the forefront of our minds we set out last week on our bi-annual outdoor staff induction process with a group of educators from across our Trust. 

We headed out into the wilderness to answer the guiding question, ‘What does it mean to be Crew?’ through a number of shared experiences and activities our Crew formed very quickly. We explored the purpose of Crew deeply and considered how we could make Crew even stronger on our return to our respective schools so that we continue to create the culture in which our students grow their character and make our community and the world a better place for everyone.

Below is an immediate reflection from one of our XP educators:

‘This experience has helped me to understand the building of community. The support that other members of our Crew showed this week has been immense. There have been some activities that have been challenging but everybody has been supportive whilst giving positive challenge so that everybody has been able to push themselves in a safe environment where everybody trusts each other and it’s lifted me and made me feel that I can achieve anything I put my mind to with the support of other people.’  – Louise

It was an honour and privilege to support and challenge our adults to reflect on the imperative we all have at XP to become and create great learners and even better human beings!

We are Crew!

Andy Sprakes and Kate ap Harri

Student Showcase for Year 6 at XP Doncaster

We’re got vacancies across XP Trust!

Find out more and apply here to #JoinOurCrew

LKS2 Teacher at Plover School

Year 5 Teacher/Leader at Carcroft School

F2 Teacher/Leader at Carcroft School

Top of the Blogs

EYFS Community Meeting @ Norton Infants

Class 7 eBook day! @ Green Top

Fun Family Learning @ Plover

Hooking in to Expedition @ Carcroft School

Crew Pasteur Check In! @ XP School

Fieldwork @ Norton Juniors

Weekly Update for Families @ XP Gateshead

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!

EYFS community meeting

Here are our latest Be Kind, Work Hard and Get Smart superstars!! It is proving very difficult to choose just 6 stars every week as all of our Reception children are demonstrating excellent habits of work and learning in their first few weeks of full time school….Well done everyone!!

We love books!

One of our favourite times of the day in class 1 is story time. At choosing time I often find the children hooked in a book in our reading areas both inside and out! It’s wonderful to see…

What do stories tell us about being kind?

This week the Kindness Elves delivered us another book titled ‘The Bog Baby’ written by Jeanne Willis. The story captured our hearts immediately and tells the tale about two sisters finding a Bog Baby in a magical pond. We discussed how the children in the story showed kindness and love. The children came up with some great examples. The beautiful illustrations inspired us this week and we all attempted to draw our very own Bog Baby in crew…

We then sculpted a Bog Baby using clay. The children used their fine motor skills and created some beautiful work! We can’t wait to paint them blue once they’ve dried…

We’re shaping up to be mini “Hugasauruses”.

Nursery once again had a visit from our friends, “The Kindness Elves”, who brought with them a gift in the shape of a book titled “The Hugasaurus” by Rachel Bright. The story follows a little dinosaur who begins school and makes friends, but it’s not long before the young dinosaurs begin to squabble. The Hugasaurus shares a hug with her new friends in a bid to help them self regulate and be kinder. Nursery have thought of ways in which they can be kind and show kindness to each other throughout the week. We began a mind map and added to it as the week progressed.

We have shared Crews throughout the week where the children have played kindness games, focusing on sharing such as; “Bounce the teddy on your knee” (where the children bounce the teddy on their knee to a rhyme and then pass it along to the person next to them when its time “for someone new”) and “The Kit Kat Game” (every other child has a Kit Kat style biscuit and they have to open their biscuit and give one stick to a new friend and keep one for themselves).

We practised being Hugasauruses and gave all of our new friends a hug, which was so lovely!

Our task to get smart this week was to create our own Hugasauruses using coloured shapes. We have produced some beautiful work.

Fabulous week Nursery!! We are understanding what it means to become kind and making new friends.

A busy week in Class 2

Our Reception children continue to amaze us with the wonderful start they have made to the school year. This week they have started their reading journey in daily phonics sessions. They have also enjoyed exploring mathematical thinking in our counting collections session today.

We have also continued to explore our kindness theme with the help of the Hugasaurus book. We created an anchor chart of kind actions of Hugasaurus and then we all had a great time ripping and scrunching paper to make our very own Hugasaurus!

Sharing our Stories: 13/09/2024

Beautiful Work This Week

Race for Bears at Plover!

This week at Plover, students in EYFS completed a sponsored Bear walk as part of their new Expedition! They raised £1148 to support their local community – and dressed up as bears to perform bear related exercises and have fun during the process! Beautiful work!

Beautiful Curation at XP Gateshead

Last week, Comms installed some new wonderful displays of student work at XP Gateshead. These wall displays are culminations of recent Expeditions and Activism from the last year.

Steplab Coaching @ XP Trust

Last Monday, our staff worked closely with Steplab to start implementing their ICT platform for coaching across XP Trust. Staff spent the day looking at effective coaching and learning and how Steplab can help create a positive culture around it.

Crew JPO/JNO’s Ullswater Story

Over the coming week’s we’ll be sharing more stories of Crew from our recent Outward Bound Expedition – here’s another from Crew JPO/JNO!

Student Showcase for Year 6 at XP Doncaster

We’re got vacancies across XP Trust!

Find out more here to apply now and #JoinOurCrew

Top of the Blogs

Magic Maths @ Norton Infants

Crew Knowles – Expedition @ Green Top

Plover Praise Postcards @ Plover

Book Talk in Crew Elmer @ Carcroft School

Crew Brunel: first week back @ XP School

Manveer gets to the top of her mountain! @ XP East

A rainy day in space! @ Norton Juniors

Beautiful Work from Will @ XP Gateshead

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!

Counting Collections

The children have blown me away with their mathematical thinking skills in our very first counting collections session of the year! They worked beautifully in pairs, listening to one another and taking turns. Here we are in action…