Today is the beginning of the holy month of Ramadan, and one of our fellow students from another Crew will be participating for the first time this year.
My Crew had lots of questions about Ramadan, some of which were able to answer between us, but we have decided to invite Adam M. to our next Crew session to tell us more about Ramadan, and why he has to fast during this period.
Meanwhile, this link from BBC Newsround provides some useful information.
Four of our Crew have Dyslexia. One student in particular has been feeling a bit upset about this over the past few days, so we thought it would be useful to discuss how his Dyslexia effects him. We used the recently released video from The British Dyslexia Association – it’s a really useful introduction to the subject.
Big thanks to Ali, Mackenzie and Bryn for speaking so open and honestly about their experiences with Dyslexia, and even bigger thanks to all the Crew for showing empathy towards their fellow students during the discussion.
A big thank you to all the parents who made it to SLCs this week. The biggest thank you should go to the students’ themselves, for their portfolio work, their preparation, their presentation, their self-reflection and for all their hard work during this term’s expeditions.
SLCs are always a bit nerve-wracking, but all my crew did themselves, their parents and (most of all) me proud 🙂
(Apologies for my terrible photo-taking skills; Megan and Brendan somewhere on this picture, I promise!)
As much as we love to be known as Crew Parker, crews at XP are generally named after influential people who embody our character values and HOWLS (so, much more worthy than the humble Mrs Parker!)
We’ve been having lots of discussions about who we want to be named after, and have narrowed it down to two options: Crew Atticus (for Atticus Finch) or Crew Peake (for Tim Peake.)
The crew have been split into 2 teams, and each team will produce a character profile of Atticus and Peake, ready for our final vote before the end of term.
There is a firm favourite at the moment, so let’s see if the group presentations can sway the vote 🙂
We spend a lot of time reading here at XP. East: we dedicate at least one Crew session a week to our accelerated reader programme and comprehension testing, as well as 15 minutes at the beginning of morning session, and another 15 minutes after lunch. We also expect students to read for 20-30 minutes at home. We are seeing some good progress in Crew Parker as students improve their reading age, and have strategies in place for those who need some extra support.
I do hear quite a few of our children grumbling when asked to get their reading books out, so it’s important to remind them why it’s so important, and why we invest so much time into reading:
As an ex-Librarian (or maybe that should be once a Librarian, always a Librarian!) I can’t promote the benefits of reading for pleasure enough. I don’t really care if it’s a physical book or an e-book; it’s the act of reading that counts.
Today I asked my Crew to think about how they feel when they receive a compliment. They make us feel happy, proud, emotional and sometimes a little bit embarrassed! However, we all agreed that a compliment is a lovely thing to receive and can really make someone’s day.
So we decided to spread some Crew Parker love by making and delivering compliment cards to our fellow students, teachers and learning coaches. Hopefully we helped to make another person feel good about themselves 🙂
Today Thomas and Bryn invited us to share what we admired about one another. It was a very fitting session for Valentine’s Day 🙂
We’ve spent the week cultivating happiness and growing our ‘attitude for gratitude’ tree.
Each day we’ve noted one thing we’re grateful for or something that has made us happy onto a post-it note and stuck it on our tree.
This was a surprisingly hard task but we soon realised that the ‘little things’ can make a big difference to our overall sense of well-being.
Noah and Nicole asked if they could use Skittles during their crew session. Sugary sweets at 8.30am? How could I refuse?!
They actually used these to play the Skittles Feelings game. The bowl full of skittles were passed around, and we had to answer questions according to the colour of the sweet. I’ve posted a picture of the rules below.
This was a great way to show compassion to eachother, especially when we were disclosing what makes us scared or sad or angry. We sometimes react by laughing at people’s fears, but we must be mindful that what seems a little thing to one person, could be a huge, upsetting thing to another! Me – I’m scared of spiders 😱
Another well-planned session where all the crew participated. We even forgave Tom D for dropping the full bowl of Skittles on the floor!!
We used Thursday’s crew session to check-in with our HOWLS (Habits of Work and Learning.) Crew were asked to give examples from over the past few weeks where they have been particularly proud of their performance against the HOWLS, but also reflect on those instances where they felt they could have been better (from low level disruption in class, not doing homework, and forgetting pens and pencils.) As ever, crew support was amazing: we applauded eachother’s achievements and discussed how we could help each other improve in areas where we may need to improve.
The HOWLS underpin everything we do at XP. East, so it’s really important that we revisit these on a regular basis so they don’t just become “words on a poster.”
