The children have been showcasing their physical skills this week in P.E. This includes, balancing, jumping, dribbling and negotiating space. We had fun whilst keeping fit…
Fitness Fun in Class 1!
Crew Gate Think Craftsmanship and Quality
in crew this morning, Crew Gate have been thinking all about craftsmanship and quality. We’ve been thinking of all the ways we can produce work we are really proud of. We spent our crew session praising our friend’s craftsman.
Spring is beginning to be sprung.
To hook Nursery back into our current expedition “How do things grow and change?” Today we took a nature walk as part of our second case study “What happens as a plant grows” to see if the children could spot any signs of growth in our environment. The children donned their finest pair of imaginary magnifying goggles and used all of their senses to investigate the signs of spring around our campus. Here is the evidence that we found…
The children found a variety of springtime flowers beginning to grow including daffodils, crocus, daisies and snowdrops. They also heard the sound of “birds tweeting” and felt the “warm sunshine” on our faces “making us feel hot”. The children also found some mini beasts waking up to start their springtime journey.
Also the children payed tribute to a past member of staff whilst examining her memory garden, by laying daisies that they’d picked, on the special pebbles. A beautiful thought and act of kindness. A wonderful and purposeful Mindful Monday.
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Sharing our Stories: 14/02/2025
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
A star in the making in Crew Pasteur @ XP
Share your stories with us!
Play Is The Work of Childhood…
Our family learning session was a real success and the children loved having their grown ups in the classroom. For our children in the Early Years, play is serious learning and it was great to see our families in all of our areas. The children were painting, counting, sorting, reading, building, writing, pretending, creating and getting smart!
Division in Year Two
We have really been activating our maths courage this morning with our first lesson on division. We used counters and collaboration to help us.
Super resilience Class Five!
Transition and co-operative play.
This week Nursery have been enjoying their outdoor learning/play at the same time as one or both of the Reception classes in EYFS. For younger children this can be daunting, having to share their space and equipment with older children and finding the courage and confidence to ask others for turns with toys. With support and modelling the children have began working collaboratively, beginning to resolve minor conflicts and starting to work co-operatively with each other ready for the summer term. The reception children were welcoming and kind, showing compassion to our youngest children. Thank you, beautiful work guys.
Oi Frogs!
Nursery have been very “hoppy” this week as they moved on to exploring the life cycle of a frog, continuing our “We are scientists” agenda of our expedition. We began our investigations with a very engaging and funny rhyming text by Kes Gray titled “Oi Frog!” The children immediately fell in love with the comedic main character Frog, who explored what a host of animals sit on, as he didn’t want to sit on a log, as Cat demanded he should. Nursery enjoyed matching animals to their rhyming seated objects and have practised independently over the week, even sharing their rhyming with their parents in our family stay and play session on Friday.
On Tuesday after the children were hooked into frogs, we investigated how a frog begins its life revisiting some of our prior learning from both caterpillar and chick life cycles. We placed toy models of the varying stages of frog into our cycle. The children connected that the caterpillars eggs and frogs were similar in more of a bubble kind of egg, rather than a shell. As we moved through the stages, the children suggested their own movements of how we could represent the cycle. We then played a game of “Froggy says…” called out the stages and the children demonstrated their moves to embed their learning.
During Tranquil Tuesday and Thoughtful Thursday crew the children followed models of how to draw a tadpole and a frog. They independently had a go with fantastic results! Such beautiful work.
The children used their scientific knowledge, construction and creative skills to create an egg box tadpole or frog, as a choice in provision. They copied examples and produced some amazing models!
Even our Maths work was frog themed, as we have been getting better at counting to three, using careful counting (touch counting to check our thoughts). We sang three little speckled frogs and acted out the song, supporting each other to count in sequence. Next we considered if we had three frogs, how many lily pads would they need to have one each? How many tadpoles if each had one baby? And how many flies they would need to feed the mummy frog? Of course I threw a few too many tadpoles and flies in the mix to check the children’s understanding, but there were “no flies on them” – the children could “toad-ally” see through my trickery.
Nursery then demonstrated and consolidated their understanding by counting out three frogs from a pond to a lily pad.
As a lovely end to our week we shared our learning with our families, playing in the provision during a family play and stay session. Mums, Dads, brothers and sisters, Grandmas, Grandads and Uncles all had lots of fun spending time and playing with their special little people. Thank you to all who attended and for all of your support, they were two beautiful sessions and we even squeezed in a demonstration of our daily Nursery Rhyme singing as part of our phonics!
EYFS Community Meeting
Well done to all of our superstars this week. It was lovely to share some wonderful acts of kindness and lots of examples of children working hard and trying their best, especially in phonics and maths. Keep up the super work Reception.
