Crew Turing lead the way

By Katie Haughey10th February 2020

I’d like to say a huge thank you for all parents and family members who attended my crew’s SLC over the past 2 weeks. The stakes rose this year as I introduced the pass/fail element. Thankfully and as expected, all my crew have passed! To prepare for their SLC, I gave them a quiz on what they thought they’d got in the most recent data drop, hoping that they would remember their most recent grades and HOWLs scores that I’d shared in crew. When they self-marked the following day, each crew member wasn’t far off their actual scores.

Hot chocolates were well deserved since my crew were highest in all 3 HOWL categories for the year group. We noticed that we were also 2nd from top for ‘be kind’ in the entire school, and that in the year 8 group, we were considerably ahead of other crews for get smart and work hard.

We also held our second student led crew this past week, Mollie and Torran prepared a football drill session. I told them I needed it to be well planned and structured so that everyone had a role and there was a clear goal for the session. They prepared 4 drills, including a warm up, passing drill, piggy in the middle activity that helped people develop their tackling skills and we finished on a short game. Roll on this coming sports day – my goal for crew is to try not to come last again!

I have asked a couple more students to prepare a session in the coming weeks, Sami has already pitched an idea to me that sounds really exciting. Finally, we doubled up with crew Parkinson on Friday to look at an important topic: sleep hygiene. We read this article and jotted down any surprising facts about sleep and the effects a lack of it had on our health.

Students were shocked about the links good sleep had with weight and appetite, dementia, cancers and performance during sports and everyday activities. We also watched a snippet of a National Geographic  documentaryon how sleep can improve retention if we get a good 9hrs after a revision session. I’m challenging my crew to aim for 8-9hrs every day this week!

A week of highlights for Crew Turing

By Katie Haughey25th January 2020

This week was kicked off with the most moving presentation of learning that I’ve experienced so far at XP East, with the preview of the ‘Should I stay or should I go’ documentary at Cast theatre. I remember a few weeks ago having a conversation with crew about whether the UK should welcome refugees and asylum seekers. There was a real mixed bag of responses.

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Nexus Dance Performance Hall Cross Upper School

By Charlotte OGrady20th January 2020

The Key stage 3 Cheerleading squad will be performing their routine at the Nexus Dance show.

Rehearsals are on Friday 24th January 4.15-5.15 (times have changed for pick up) we will arrive back at school at 5.30. This is for students only.

Dance Show Wednesday 29th January 6pm-8pm. Students will leave from school at 4pm. Students will receive 2 tickets for the performance all other tickets can be bought on the door at £3.

If you require anymore information please contact Miss O’Grady

X25 & E25 are producing some fabulous oil pastel studies in their Art sessions

By Emily Jones19th January 2020

Year 8 students have been experimenting with oil pastels this term in their art sessions to create some beautiful sunset inspired blends. Can’t wait to see the finished pieces.

What will 2020 bring?

By Katie Haughey12th January 2020

Crew Turing have just reunited for their first week of crew in 2020 after a joyous 2 weeks off celebrating Christmas and getting some well deserved rest! We started check-in on Monday by sharing any new year’s resolutions that we had thought of. Some included

  • Lexi wants to gain confidence in gymnastics so she can accomplish more
  • Reece would like to learn certain skills with his surfing that he wasn’t able to master last summer
  • Many students wanted to improve their organisation – making sure they had their equipment and homework was completed on time
  • Lots of us spoke about increasing time for reading

I invested in a crew calendar to help with the resolution of improving our organisation. In the coming weeks, we will have SLCs to prep for, a HUMs presentation of learning, and various other deadlines to meet. Crew agreed that by tracking this we’d be much better prepared for what we’ve got coming up so we can hold each other (including myself) to account.

On Wednesday, we ate breakfast together in the student kitchen and created a ‘Crew To-do list” for the student led conference preparation, which included dates for when work needed to be completed by. It was nice to refresh ourselves of the whole process and what we would need to do. We agreed that rather than doing SLC prep in crew every day, that this time some of the work would be set as extended study. I trust that my crew can work well independently on these tasks now they’re a whole year wiser, and I can’t wait for them to share their expeditionary work with me.

I’m going to be putting on Monday night sessions where students can come and work in my room (A04) to get scripts completed.

We ended the week with a little inter-crew competition of capture the flag. I loved how my crew discussed their defensive strategies and were working as a team to fend off the other crew. It was also lovely to get a bit of fresh air and get our blood pumping after an exhausting first week back!

E26 and E25 have submitted some excellent extended studies!

By Emily Jones5th December 2019

E26 and E25 have been learning about warm and cool colours in their X Block art sessions.

They have a really good understanding of this, as you can see from their work!

E25 (Year 8) STEAM Presentation of Learning

By Katie Haughey29th November 2019

The Year 8 STEAM presentation of learnings will be held on:

  • Pioneer: Wednesday 18th December, 5-6PM at XP East

  • Explorer: Thursday 19th December 5-6PM at XP East

The students look forward to sharing the work they’ve been studying in the STEAM expedition, where they have been working towards the guiding question “What is the state of the nation’s health and what should we do about it?”

We welcome you to invite family and friends to the event, sign in will begin at 4:45PM on both nights. We also ask that students remain in school from 3:15PM until the event, if there’s an issue with this don’t hesitate to drop me an email: [email protected]

Take a sneak peek at E25’s final product!

By Natalie Johnson27th November 2019

Students in E25 were joined by visitors from the Conversation Club on Tuesday morning where they hosted ‘Minute to Win It’ games.

As part of our expedition ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go?’ we are answering the guiding question, ‘Why Should We Care About Migration?’, which means we have spent lots of time meeting and interviewing asylum seekers from our local community, finding out what it is like to move from one country to another and what the difficulties are.

During the morning we moved away from interview questions and instead focused on building a sense of community. Students really enjoyed teaming up with friends from the Conversation Club in order to compete against each other, whilst having fun- with a few surprises along the way!

We would like to appreciate those that took time out of their day to join us, with a special thanks to Nic for his extra games providing us with lots of laughs! See why here:

I am very proud of all of the students in E25 for the compassion they have shown throughout the expedition, it was heart warming to see the smiles on everyones faces this afternoon!

E25 Sponsored Run

By Natalie Johnson25th November 2019

As you will be aware, E25 were due to complete their 5k sponsored run/ walk around Lakeside today afternoon (26th Nov) but unfortunately due to unforeseeable circumstances and staff absences this has had to be postponed until next week, Tuesday 3rd December. Could we please ask that all sponsorship forms are brought into school by Thursday 28th November. Sponsor money will should be brought in by Friday 6th December – thank you to those who have already done this.

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Please be aware that students are still expected to bring in their PE kit on Tuesday. 

We appreciate all of your support in helping us to fund an education and support people in Doncaster’s Community.

A special mention to Aaron and Denim who have raised between them £55! – this is fantastic and any amount sponsored will be much appreciated, it’ll all add up!

 

ABOVE ALL, COMPASSION. 

Marginal gains in Crew Turing

By Katie Haughey24th November 2019

 

I’d like to say a huge thank you to Mrs Green for coming in and doing a session on careers with my crew! I can’t wait to build on the work she did helping my crew come up with careers they might be interested in or suited to based on the questionnaires they filled in. This week we’ll look further into some options and what they will need to do in terms of qualifications or work experience to enter certain industries or careers.

This week, my crew have been focusing on our position on the crew dashboards comparatively with other crews in E25. I’m delighted that we have almost no entries to the negative conduct form and that on the whole, extended study is handed in on time and equipment is organised amongst my crew.

There were two aspects of the dashboard that we acknowledged needed working on: praise form entries and our attendance. There were lots of bugs being passed about last term, even I ended up really poorly at one point! However, we’ve made an agreement that this term we focus on making marginal gains in terms of our attendance percentage as every day at school mattered.

We even did the maths, since our average attendance last term was just 90%, as a collective crew we’d miss out on over 100 days of school if we carried on like this! I’m already seeing a great improvement this week.

The issue of our praise form entries was something that we also needed to intervene in as a crew. We discussed how we could improve our number of entries on the praise form, and we decided to set a challenge. Daily, each member of my crew were to record how many times another crew member put their hand up and answered a question or posed a question to a teacher to help clarify their understanding. Here’s how they got on:

I’d like to massively appreciate Torran for his improvement from no entries on day 1 to 5 by day 3 and Dylan for increasing his to 13 on one day! Most of my crew really rose to the challenge and I, amongst others, noticed a real difference in sesion. We even went from the bottom scorers on the praise entries, to the 3rd crew in the year, making gains of +4.0 in our entry average. I’m going to carry this on next week until we reign supreme at the top of the crew dashboard, I’m determined that each marginal gain will have a huge impact on our comparative scores across the crews.

Another focus we’ll be looking towards as a crew this week is the general election and taking a wider look at the world around us. I’ve got us a subscription to National Geographic magazine which I’m going to make the focus of this week’s accelerated reader crew, I can’t wait to delve into important issues in our global community!