It’s now time to record your synopsis of Chapters 2 and 3.
Remember – your task is to show a key moment from the chapters, including key characters and a description of an important event.
We would like you be creative, thinking ‘outside the box’ about how you could represent your work.
Examples might include artwork, modelling, collage, use of ICT, poetry, etc.
Looking forward to seeing your work!
Due: Tuesday 30th January
Students have 3 exercises to complete in MyMaths. These are additional practice questions for our Chefistry expedition on:
Ratio and proportion.
At this stage students should not worry about whether they are too easy or too hard, as each task increases in difficulty.
The username is:
xpschool
The password is:
rectangle137
Students then use the details I shared with them in class to get into myportal.
The deadline for both classes is Wednesday at 8pm.
We would like you to illustrate an important scene from Chapter 1. Your image should be accompanied by a short summary describing the main events of the chapter and the main characters we have been introduced to.
Due in Thursday 25th January 2018
As part of our immersion last week students from Pioneer and Explorer spent a session making notices and wonders, Looking at bread and popcorn kernels. The groups discussed how it might link to our new expedition. The bread was toasted and the popcorn cooked, students made notices linked to the changes that had taken place, including the smell, the colour the shape and size.
Both classes worked extremely hard during the session it was great to hear their theories about how toast and popcorn linked to the expedition.
Chefistry is our next Year 7 expedition, running between January and February for STEAM. The guiding question for the learning expedition is:
“What have physics and chemistry got to do with cooking?”
We kicked off our immersion week by visiting King Asia food. The students had a great experience seeing how food goes from an idea, to mass production and distributed nationwide. Below you can see short clip of the students trying some King Asia food. Unfortunately, we could not film inside the main production halls. This is where the students were able to see some amazing food machines, including a rice cooker the size of a lorry! You can find more information about King Asia by clicking here.
Yesterday we visited the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool as part of our ‘immersion week’. This is a period of time where we immerse students in content linked to our forthcoming expedition, often involving fieldwork and input from experts.
Our guiding question has not yet been revealed, as students need to make educated guesses as to what the expedition content and themes will be about.
This term, HUMAN (humanities subjects) and STEM (science, technology, engineering and Maths) will be taking part in separate expeditions.
We would like to thank the museum for their support and expertise. Students’ behaviour was respectful and courteous throughout, and as you can see from the video they were totally engaged in the powerful subject matter.
As part of our immersion week, students have spent time in the Science Lab. The session covered Lab safety, how to light a bunsen burner, and our first experiment of 2018. It was a great way to kick off our expedition.
As part of Human, during case study 3 students learnt about the future of rail and how it will impact on Doncaster’s community. Students were introduced to the HS2 and the debate that is currently ongoing. After closely studying both sides of the debate students were encouraged to make an informed decision as to whether they were for or against HS2.
On the last day of term Explorer and Pioneer came together to debate whether they felt HS2 was a beneficial or not. Students spoke with amazing clarity around the points they were making, they were respectful to each other listening intently and responding in a professional manner to counter argue points.
After listening to all the arguments for and against, a student from each side of the debate made a closing speech. At this point the panel gave everyone to the chance to change sides if they felt they had been persuaded by the opposition. Nobody moved to ‘against’, 1 student switched to ‘for’ and 4 students were left undecided.
This was a fantastic way to end the term and our very first expedition in XP East, students were eager to argue their point and did so with passion and knowledge.
Dear George,
I just wanted to let you know that we used your recent work on ‘What does the community of Doncaster owe to the Railway?’ in our lesson yesterday.
After accidentally seeing and hearing you present your work to the whole of Y7 Pioneer, I knew that I had to share your work with my own Humanities class – 7 Explorer. Miss Poncia shared your Google Doc with me, and we copied and pasted a paragraph onto a side of A4 paper, and then glued it onto some larger paper.
During session 5 (just 3 lessons after hearing your work) I put students into groups of 5 and they took part in a carousel activity where they looked at each one of your paragraphs, in order to see what success looks like, and made annotations.
I phoned your Dad to praise you for your wonderful work, and to thank you for working so hard on it. 7 Explorer were very impressed and we will continue to look at the annotations during the last few lessons on our final draft.
Thank you, and well done George!
We would like to thank Hitachi Rail Europe of Doncaster for hosting our recent fieldwork to their depot last week. Students were given a tour of their incredible premises by team leaders and specialist engineers. Their work is described as providing ‘a total railway system supplier offering rolling stock, traction equipment, signalling, traffic management systems, and maintenance depots.’
We visited Hitachi in order to support the final phase of our ‘Society, Speed and Steam’ expedition on ‘What does the community of Doncaster owe to the railway?’
Hitachi staff gave students a tour of the facilities and some of the trains that were being maintained there. They also highlighted the range of jobs, careers and expertise from their staff, along with explanations of some of the scientific and engineering processes involved. The Hitachi team were really friendly and supportive throughout the entire period of time that we spent there.
We would also like to thank Andrew Webb (the Rail Sector Development Manager for ‘Business Doncaster’) who liaised with Debra Morrel of Hitachi in order to arrange our fieldwork.
I was delighted with not only our students’ conduct, but also with the probing questions that they asked the Hitachi staff.
