It’s all too easy when we come back from a couple of weeks’ holiday to get swept up in the busy school days.  We talk about hitting the ground running, but it is just as important to set aside quality time to relax together.

Crew Ali have been focussing on a bit of ‘time out’ in Crew this week, in two sessions where we let our creative juices flow and painted with watercolour paints.  We played calming piano music in the background for one session and our Crew playlist for the second session.  Both sessions were an opportunity become immersed in creating, without the pressure of a critique of our products.  Some of us painted recognisable images, others experimented with colour and water techniques.  There were even some potential Mother’s Day paintings in the pipeline!

Crew Ali just love being in the Sports Hall and having a go at a few teamwork activities.  This week Tom took the lead, with some team games to challenge our speed and accuracy in jumping and running, as well as developing our throwing and catching skills.

In the latter part of the session we did a short mid-game debrief, in which we discussed the biggest challenge: some Crew members had become frustrated over different interpretations of the rules.  We all acknowledge that sometimes we come across difficult moments in Crew and we got through it – with some clarification of Tom’s rules and an agreement to draw a line under it and move on, we got back to our game.  Finally we finished with a good old game of football.

It’s always good to start the day with some physical activity – it definitely woke us all up!

Crew Young visited Crew Ali this week to teach them about the Method of Loci: a technique which could help us to recall lists or key facts in a particular sequence.  Find out more about their preparation and practice here on the Crew Young blog.

Our Crew were engaged throughout and it was interesting to see how many of the words from the list we were able to recall after doing the exercise.  Many thanks Crew Young for taking the time to work with us!

E25 students have also been using this method, also known as the Memory Palace, in STEAM sessions, to help them understand the sequence of organs in the digestive system.

Crew Ali have been expressing themselves in sign language recently, when Cerys taught us the British Sign Language alphabet in Student-Led Crew.  We learnt how to sign each letter, practiced and practiced again, then took it in turns to spell out names of Crew members and had to guess who was being named.  Taylor, Caiden and Marshall all successfully signed the names of some of their fellow Crew members before we moved on to learning numbers and practiced telling the Crew our ages (including Mrs Townson’s age – we share a lot in Crew!)

A Friday session involved using scrabble letters to create words which would stretch us and add to our vocabularies.  We worked in mixed teams and swapped over after each round to ensure we worked with different people.  In each round we had a time limit to create the longest words we could with the limited letters available on our table.  Each team had to check their spellings and really think about how they could extend their words as far as possible.

I – N – D – E – P – E – N – D – E – N – T – L – Y was a clear winner but I have to say well done to the team who came up with T – O – W – N – S – O – N !

Crew Ali and Crew Parkinson had a great time competing against one another in a game of bench netball and I’m proud to say that Crew Ali won.  In the debrief after our game, we considered what went well and what could be even better: the team spirit of both Crews meant they kept pushing to the end and cheering one another on; this was definitely a friendly match!  Crew Ali had arrived first in the Sports Hall and had a bit of a warm up, so perhaps we could do this together next time, as well as perhaps mixing the teams up.

We have promised ourselves there will be a rematch soon!