Mr Wolf’s Pancakes.

During the week commencing 19th February Nursery celebrated Pancake day through the story of Mr Wolf’s Pancake’s by Jan Fearnley, linking to our expedition by immersing ourselves in Fairytale characters. This story is an alternative view point of Mr Wolf’s behaviour, as he is portrayed as a kind, polite and reasonable character, whilst the other fairytale characters are not being very kind to him as wouldn’t help him in any way to make pancakes, even though he was being kind and polite to them.

The children thought about their own experiences of Pancake Day at home and shared those special memories, thinking about whether or not they were helpful to their families?

Mr Wolf needed a recipe to help him make the pancakes, so Nursery investigated what a recipe is? They shared the recipe for the pancakes during reading crew and looked at the ingredients and equipment needed to make pancakes, just like Mr Wolf. The children then worked in small groups to make pancakes and could choose from various toppings including, Orange and lemon juice, sugar, syrup, honey and chocolate spread. Nursery surprised everyone and tried new things on their pancakes, many choosing Honey. They were yummy!

Nursery also role played the story, working in Old Mother Hubbards Shop and creating pancakes in the play dough and outdoors. Great work!

Ready, Steady, Read! 📕

Over half term the children took part in a sponsored reading event in partnership with Usborne Books. Their challenge was to read as much as possible and in an unusual or exciting place. We have loved sharing their photographs and Miss Tunney chose Pippa Evans as the winning entry. How exciting to read in the cockpit of a plane!

We feel extremely grateful to the children and their families for raising a phenomenal £3303!

This money will be used to buy new library books for our schools. Thank you so much!

Working hard in class 1 🌟

The children have enjoyed being back with their friends, making models, sharing stories and learning together ❤

This week the children in Reception have been exploring the story Mr Wolf’s Pancakes by Jan Fearnley. The children then enjoyed tasting some delicious pancakes…

What is Mental Health?

We had a focus on mental health in our assembly this morning. We thought about who we could talk to if we were struggling and we made pledges of something we would do this weekend to make our minds happy.

I can’t wait to hear about what you did next week!

Mrs Parsons xx

Around the world in one lesson …

Key Stage One have been researching different animals and their habitats this week. Each class has researched a different habitat and location around the world.

We visited each classroom this morning to look at their anchor charts and research to learn about the different locations around the world.

It was great to hear the children being Geographers and learning so much from each other.

Mrs Parsons x

Mr Wolf’s Pancakes

This week the children in Reception have been exploring the story Mr Wolf’s Pancakes by Jan Fearnley. In the story Mr Wolf made lots of delicious pancakes that his neighbours wanted to share with him.

The children then used their skills to create their own pancakes. They loved flipping them in the play dough area!

The children then learned the instructions of how to make a pancake. They thought of their own actions and then performed this in their crews.

Next the children ordered the instructions in their books and created some beautiful writing to annotate their work. Well done Class Two!

Celebrating Chinese New Year.

The week commencing 05/02/24 Nursery were exploring their latest text within our expedition Once upon a Time – Who is hiding in the pages of this book? We were looking a comparison of the traditional tale of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”, through a text titled “Goldy Luck and the Three Pandas” by Natasha Yim. This story is a celebration of oriental culture made accessible to children through a traditional tale. The Children really enjoyed learning about the differences between the bears in the story, Goldy Luck and Goldilocks and the Chinese culture overall, which made great links for the celebration of Chinese New Year.

Goldy Luck, Mr and Mrs Chen had rice porridge known as Congee in their adaptation of the story, so the children played and investigated rice in the sensory tray. They filled red containers and and practised picking up Pom poms with chop sticks building their fine motor skills in our finger gym.

We then researched Panda Bears by looking at non fiction texts in our Tuesday Reading Crew using the text “ A Book of Bears” by Katie Viggers. The children learned where Pandas come from, where they live, what they eat and what they look like. We used this information and other stimulus to produce beautiful artwork of Panda faces.

Children experimented with Chinese dining within our role play area, sitting on floor cushions and using tweezers and chop sticks to eat pretend noodles in their role play. Nursery also had a Chinese food tasting crew on Thoughtful Thursday, during which they tried a number of new foods including noodles, Sweet and Sour Sauce and Prawn Crackers. Most of the children liked the noodles 🍜 and had second helpings. Some of the words used to describe the sweet and sour sauce were “Spicy”, “Tingly”, “Sweet” and “Hot”.

Nursery explored traditional Chinese dress and took part in their own traditional street parade. The children split into two groups and played a range of instruments and took turns to march and dance, exploring various levels in pairs using Chinese dragons. What beautiful work they produced!

Throughout the week children created various paintings of a Chinese theme including dragons and lanterns as it is officially the year of the dragon, 2024. This got us thinking about the year of the children’s birth which was for most the year of the Rat or some the year of the Ox. We watched of short video/puppet show about the ancient myth of how the Chinese calendar came to exist and the order of the animals by year. The children took part in an online tutorial modelled by myself to draw a rat 🐀, representing the year of their birth. The results were awesome, we have some budding artists.

Sharing our Stories: 09/02/2024

Beautiful Work This Week

XPG Studios

Have you seen this awesome Instagram page, created to showcase the beautiful work from the 150 (and counting!) artists at XP Gateshead? You can see everything they’ve done and follow them here.

Here are some examples recent work they’ve produced…

Beautiful Curation: Plover School

This week, beautiful work from LKS2’s last Expedition ‘Coming to Doncaster – Why then, why now?’ has been curated outside the school! Be sure to stop and take a look at their work on migration, Roman history and sharing stories!

Beautiful Work in the Community: Earth Emergency

In Autumn 2023, Green Top School’s UKS2 children undertook a learning expedition called Earth Emergency. The guiding question was: How can we help our planet survive? Their beautiful artwork is on display on a shopfront on Fieldside in Thorne.

Top of the Blogs

Beautiful work from Arlo and Daniel @ XP Gateshead

Exploring and Embedding Goldilocks and the three bears @ Norton Infants

Safer Internet Day @ Green Top

Crew RPU/ABT getting SLC ready @ XP

We Can Collaborate! @ Plover

Crew Rashford sharing the love @ XP East

Fun in the snow @ Carcroft School

Ponder, Persevere, Practice but never Procrastinate @ Norton Juniors

We’re looking for great teachers at XP Gateshead!

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If you are a teacher looking for a model of schooling that dares to break the mould, then this might just be for you. There is now the opportunity of a lifetime to teach at the newest of our extraordinary schools, XP Gateshead.

Find out more and apply here to #JoinOurCrew

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!