Crew Turing – star wars day, pupdates, academic crew, and appreciations!

By Katie Haughey9th May 2020

May the fourth be with you…

This week has been a highly eventful week for Crew Turing, starting at the end of last week with Lexi’s birthday, followed by Alice and Torran’s on Monday. Each crew member has reportedly enjoyed their lock down birthdays despite not being able to see friends, we made sure to include some fun on our crew hangout.

With Alice and Torran’s birthday coinciding with May 4th, we did a Star Wars themed quiz on Kahoot! Congratulations to Lewis for winning top prize, with Ralph and Lewis in close second.

Academic crew: getting smart in lockdown

This week I have added a further ‘drop in’ non compulsory crew slot that I invited people to join for an academic crew. I was joined by multiple members of my crew, we shared a doc that we collaborated on to support one another with their learning. This week’s focus was hums, we built background knowledge about the new expedition, ‘Wave after Wave’. It was fascinating to learn about the Early Modern Period, I’d like to appreciate Molly, Reece and Lexi for reaching out, and for how well you worked together on this. It was almost as good as being back in school!

 

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT: CALLUM ANDERSON

Callum has been (& always is, let’s be honest) a star in crew this week, he’s been cracking on especially hard while in school this week, and has received an e-postcard from Mr Pearson, for the high quality spanish work he’s producing. Not only this, on Thursday afternoon I recieved a heartwarming email from Mr Burke:

‘Bless Callum Ando! what a kid he is. He’s done right well with his maths. Such a nice lad!’

I love hearing about how my crew have been getting on. Keep it up Callum!

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT: MOLLIE BUTLER

Another student who needs a mention in this blogpost is Mollie, for her frankly astounding work for HUMs on crime and punishment in the Elizabethan times, you are clearly working extremely hard Mollie. I loved reading your notes from the work set this week, you absolute superstar!!

Pupdates:

We ended the week with a bit of a daft crew session where we celebrated my dogs first birthday! I asked people with pups to bring them on hangout and we did a quiz on dogs.

I’d like to appreciate Coco (Ralph’s Pug, see picture below!), Rebel (Jess’ new puppy), Lewis and his pug Sid, Rufus (Dylan’s Labradoodle) & Mollie for sharing her pictures of her gorgeous Labs with me and making Iggy Pup’s quarantine birthday one to remember!

Important Updates for this week:

  • I’ll be hosting crew on Monday at 11:30AM, and Thursday at 2:00PM
  • I will also host another academic crew on Tuesday and Thursday to help my crew with any work, time tbc. This is a drop in session, they do not have to join!
  • I’d like them to complete a slide on the ‘Turing Memories’ slides I have shared for Thursday, or share pictures/email me with what they’ve been up to & I’ll add it to their slides
  • The students are on half term from Friday [2 weeks off!]

 

What are you looking forward to?

By J Townson5th May 2020

Our Crew check-in this week on our Google Hangout was “what are you most looking forward to when lockdown ends?” and we had some lovely answers!

  • Eating at McDonald’s came to mind for Marshall
  • I think all of us are looking forward to seeing family and friends
  • A number of the Crew are just excited at the thought of being in school (XP East is just that good!)
  • Cerys is really looking forward to ice skating – not something you can really practice from home!
  • Going to festivals – Zak has tickets to Leeds Festival in August and it is still happening as far as we’re aware…
  • What are you most looking forward to?

And what have we been getting up to, to pass the time when we’re not doing our school work?  Leoni has been doing mindfulness colouring, Zak is continuing with his basketball and Cerys with her baking – check out the cake below!

Charlie and Ruben have both shaved their heads to keep cool in the warmer weather and keep their hair under control – though we haven’t got photographs to share yet!

In recognition of his participation and commitment to Crew Hangouts every week, I also nominated Marshall for a mention on Mrs Poncia’s Associate Principal blog:

It’s also great to see several of the Crew going above and beyond in their learning, even when working remotely.  Special mentions in the last week or so go to:

  • Ruben for getting ahead on his HUMAN work and asking for even more before the new expedition started!
  • Cerys, Caiden, Leoni, Marshall and Zak for full completion of their HUMAN immersion.
  • Cerys, Charlie, Marshall, Ruben and Tom for going above and beyond in Maths on at least one occasion, in Cerys’ case, with every single task!
  • Billy, Leoni, Marshall and Ruben completing their STEAM tasks way ahead of this week’s deadline on 8th May.
  • Great completion rate across the Arts for Leoni and Cerys, again ahead of the deadline in Leoni’s case.
  • Zak, Ruby, Leoni, Lacey, Charlie and Cerys all receiving e-postcards from Mr Pearson in Spanish.

I’m really impressed that there are so many names of our Crew members mentioned by staff in a positive light in the various meetings we have each week.  Let’s make sure any deadlines we are behind on are caught up and that we keep helping one another to be successful despite the wait until you can all have a celebratory McDonald’s!

Catching up on Crew Hangouts

By H Hickson4th May 2020

Each week since COVID-19 caused schools to close we’ve been having Crew over Google Hangouts. It’s been wonderful to see Crew and have a chat to them, despite not able to be all together. We’ve not yet managed a whole crew hangouts – our maximum being 10 out of 12 members getting involved at once so it’d be great if we can all reunite soon!


Our conversations have covered what we’ve each been up to since the lockdown, how we’re getting on with completing work and our highlights and lowlights of the week. It’s been lovely to hear that crew having been busy baking, going out walking, going on bike rides, watching Netflix (Tiger King generated a lot of conversation the other week!), chatting to each other on PS4 and trying not to go stir crazy!

One of my favourite sessions we’ve had was today when we shared photos of us as babies/toddlers. Thanks for sharing these Crew – what a cute bunch you were!

Can other students/staff guess which photo belongs to which Crew member? Email me your answers!

Crew member 1:

Crew member 2:

Crew member 3:

 

Crew member 4:

Crew member 5:

 

Making the most of the sunshine and some great praise!

By J Townson20th April 2020

Crew Ali have been busy over the last week with various endeavours, many of them making the most of the lovely weather we have been having around keeping up with their online learning schedules.

I have seen some lovely praise for our Crew from staff who are recognising students Working Hard and Getting Smart with their learning.  Keep it up Crew Ali!  Here is a message Mr Pearson sent to Cerys for her hard work in Spanish:

And Caiden’s artwork here for his ‘Power poster’ earned him a special mention from Mrs Cross and was highlighted during a staff Expeditionary Team meeting:

Ruby hadn’t used her bike since Year 7 but is enjoying the long, if tiring bike rides with her dad and brother.  A great way to pass the time, get fit and ensure you sleep well at night too.

Tom has been exploring his local area on foot and found some new places to walk, essential for someone who loves to be outside.

Marshall’s family and neighbours go outside every day at 11am to dance on the street whilst observing social distancing rules – a great way to exercise and have fun.  They regularly update the YouTube channel – why not subscribe and join in from your street?!  Check out Marshall and his dad (dressed as The Hulk!) from 1 minute and 45 seconds in:

They also do a weekly quiz as many of you have been doing, with a modified WWE belt as a prize for the winner!

Caiden’s family are getting ready for when lockdown finishes as their garden is looking great – with a completed vegetable patch ready to feed everyone, as well as buildng a garden bar and rainbow painted seating area.  He’s looking into do the Chelsea Virtual Soccer School activities with his younger brother too.

Charlie has been making up for missing out on haircuts by shaving his head, and now informs us that he needs to put suncream all over his head when he goes out in the sun – the sunshine hasn’t been great for everyone it seems!

I have been spending time with my two daughters and husband in our garden, making dens out of all the garden furniture, blankets and pillows and helping my eldest learn to ride her bike.  She also loves the Chelsea Virtual Soccer School activities (I showed a few of the Crew a video of her balancing a football on her foot) and we can recommend the Lockdown Panto on Facebook for all ages on a rainy day!  She is starting school in September and loves to hear what my ‘school children’ in the Crew have been up to, as well as practising her writing, alphabet and numbers.  Many of our Crew have younger siblings and it’s lovely to know many of them are working on their learning together.

It is always lovely to see what Crew Ali get up to and we continue to check in every Monday and at various other points in the week 1-1 as needed.  More photos and videos to be posted soon!

How am I spending my time?

By J Townson10th April 2020

We had our second Google Hangout this Monday and I’m glad to say we had almost a full-house!  It was lovely to hear from you all; it’s really important we have that contact each week to make sure everything is going ok.  We had two students missing, so I have been in touch with them and next week we will be aiming for all 13 online together.

The Crew Challenge this week was for each member of the Crew to come up with an idea of something they wanted to do or work on during the time spent away from the classroom, particularly for some of our students who live further from the school site, who are gaining in some cases almost 2 hours a day in saved travel time!  Here are some of the ideas they have had so far:

Caiden – he and his dad have built a vegetable patch and he even took his device out into the garden to show us.  We’re looking forward to seeing how it goes, with potatoes and carrots being just some of the vegetables they plan to grow.

Charlie – keeping fit, as Charlie is a keen footballer and obviously can’t play with his team at the moment!

Ruby and Leoni – Ruby and Leoni have been tidying their rooms, getting it all in order and Ruby really wants to have a solid plan in place for next week’s Crew session.  There’s a lot to be said for setting aside time to organise the space you spend so much time in.

Tom – learning to solve a rubix cube.  We have requested a video of him doing it once he has mastered the skill!

Marshall – alongside putting a focus on his schoolwork, Marshall has dedicated time to playing family games with his parents and younger siblings

Zak – developing his basketball skills is on Zak’s to-do-list, including perfecting his slam dunks.  We’re waiting for some photos of his makeshift basketball net!

Mrs Townson – alongside keeping my two small daughters busy, I have been reading, playing board games with my husband and taking time each day to develop my meditation skills – some of the Crew enjoy it when we take a few minutes to quietly refocus in Crew – some of them feel a bit silly sitting still with their eyes closed, but they humour me and do it anyway!

A few of you mentioned getting a bit bored once your schoolwork is out of the way each day, so remember the resources on our Crew Google Classroom to inspire you, including the Duke of Edinburgh resources to develop your Physical fitness, your Skills and also ideas to allow you to do Volunteering, even whilst in lockdown.  We won’t start D of E until Year 9, but the ideas apply to people of all ages.

Looking forward to our next Crew Hangout next week!

Mrs Townson

Crew Ali checking-in from home

By J Townson3rd April 2020

The school highlight of my week has definitely been our Crew Google Hangout on Monday morning; whenever we have had time away (even just for the weekend!) I always find seeing our Crew members in our morning sessions sets me up for the day and reminds me of why I work at XP.  The last few weeks of the ‘new normal’ have been anything but normal I think, but Crew Ali is doing well and I’m so proud to be their Crew Leader!

In our Google Hangout this week we just did a simple check-in to see how everyone was getting on with workload and the new ‘timetable’, as well as find out what they had been doing to fight the boredom that some of them were feeling, particularly with not being able to visit friends or family or leave the house for days out, etc.

I think it’s fair to say that most of us (me included) have found being away from the rhythm of daily Crew and carving out a routine at home a challenge.  Many of us have more distractions at home and the lack of structure can be stressful for some; conversely, for others, in the first week that school was closed, the high expectations and volume of structured work on the timetable were overwhelming!  We appreciate the work Mr Portman and the leadership team have put into taking student and parent concerns on board and creating a flexible but really clear and manageable overview to support students in engaging in their learning from home. I particularly love the scheduling of Common Mission time to enrich our students’ learning opportunities and give breadth to our existing offering.  Remember that across the XP Trust we take a 3-dimensional approach to learning, which incorporates Academic Success, Beautiful Work, and Character Growth.

This week, in response to our check-ins, I challenged Crew Ali to think about their personal as well as academic development, by reflecting on the question: What will you do with the time you have available in lockdown?  We had some ideas in the Crew session and they are spending this week planning goals for themselves and coming up with more ideas to make the most of their spare time around their academic studies.  Here are some of the things our Crew members have been getting up to so far – why not try a few out yourself?

  • Watching a new series on Netflix with other family members – Ruby recommends ‘Locke and Key’
  • Learning a new instrument – Lacey’s family brought their piano down from the loft and they have been learning to play it
  • Lots of us have been keeping in touch with friends on Facetime or Houseparty
  • Exercise – several of the Crew have been doing the Joe Wicks workout each morning; Caiden has been cycling; Leoni has been playing football in the garden; Ruben has been walking his new puppy!
  • Cooking – Caiden has been making bread and homemade lemonade
  • Crafting – Marshall has been making salt dough handprints, then baking them ready to paint; he has also been drawing and playing console games with his dad
  • Mrs Townson has been writing a list of goals I want to achieve before my new baby arrives in June – then putting a plan in place to action them!  One of these is to make time for myself each day – it can be difficult to do when you’re in a house with other people all the time, but is really important for your wellbeing.
  • Check out the resources on the XP Trust EMBRACE website to help you look after your mental health and wellbeing.  Encourage More, Be Resilient And Consider Everyone

Keep safe and stay home everyone!

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.

Continue reading →

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!

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!

Start the day with gratitude

By A Brown8th November 2019

So this week in Crew we’ve been focusing on gratitude and appreciation. How can we be more grateful for the things we take for granted? How can we remind ourselves of all the positivity around us when there are so many negative images forced upon us each day? How can we use gratitude to shift our feelings from negative to positive?

We started with some appreciations, then looked at this meme and discussed what resonated with each of us in Crew?

It was really interesting that our discussion took us into a way of realising that actually even in really difficult, sad, troubling or depressing situations, gratitude and spending a moment to think about either the positives in an apparently negative situation, or even looking for the things we are grateful for can help to lift us into better spirits: more contentment and happiness.

We explored the language of “cultivating a shift” – how can we take control of our emotions and feelings, to not ignore them (it’s ok to be sad, feel down, have a tough day!) – but we can choose whether we let those emotions control our mind, or whether we want to try and shift our minds into a more positive state.

We can dwell on situations out of our control. For instance, Fin showed courage and talked about his bad knee, and how it prevents him from doing activities and being as physical as he’d like to be, but he realises there is little he can do about the situation.

We discussed how this could be really frustrating or depressing. But with a shift in thinking about what good has come out of his injury – what he has to be grateful about – he could see that his friends really step up and look after him when he’s in pain, rallying around him; his friendships are strengthened by his injury!

We ended the session by writing down as many things as possible on a post-it note that we are grateful for.

Try it at home? What are you grateful for today? Can you acknowledge the things that make us depressed or sad or down, and “cultivate a shift” towards using out emotional energy to be grateful and feel positive about what we DO have?