Crew Mandela have been investigating their habits of work and learning this week. This is to fully understand the ‘why’ behind the grades from teachers and understand how they can improve. Students have really taken ownership in the crew to investigate their own HOWLS. There has been a major increase in the crew average for Be Kind that we were especially proud of as a crew. As the sign reads outside the school front gates…
Above all, is compassion
The crew today have started their student led conference (SLC) preparation to be ready for the final parent meeting of the year. The crew have paid particular attention to selecting key artefacts of the expedition. The whole crew have decided that this will be the first SLC that they will deviate from the script and go ‘solo’. In past SLCs, students have prepared scripts and almost read this word for word.
It has been great to see the growing courage and confidence of crew Mandela, as they now have decided they no longer need this support and only work from bullet points when talking to parents. Great work crew!
Today as crew leader I was incredibly proud of the crew for showing the courage to once again speak in front of the entire year group and 50 parents for the latest HUMs expedition.
In particular, the moment where Corey spoke about his family to the audience brought the entire crowd close to tears! It was an emotional evening and all students produced high quality work, this was highlighted by Frida’s explanation of the Macbeth story and how this contributed to ‘fake news’
This morning in Academic Crew, as I came in, the crew were already seated and in a deep discussion about the Chernobyl disaster. The Chernobyl disaster was a catastrophic nuclear accident that occurred on 26 April 1986, in the No. 4 nuclear reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, near the city of Pripyat, in the north of the Ukrainian SSR, near the Byelorussian SSR border.
Holly was leading the discussion and explained how radiation can affect humans and its damaging effect of DNA. We then investigated as a crew the most radioactive places on Earth. Links were made by Corey and Raven to the current joint expedition in STEAM and HUMS as the term radioactive had been mentioned during the immersion.
The crew have conducted their own revision session on current resistance and voltage today. Corey and Raven led the revision session where students were asked to construct series and parallel circuits and compare the difference between current drops.
Raven noticed that when a component in a parallel circuit is removed, other bulbs and components still allow for electrons to flow, Raven also noted that this is why houses use parallel circuits and not series!
This week Crew Mandela have been completing their final products for expedition High Voltage. This has needed a number of high level skills from the crew including soldering, drilling, scoring and shaping the wood.
Outstanding crew support has come from Raven who has helped the entire crew to finish their designs and complete the base of the boxes. See the image below for a sneak preview of the final games.
8/E24 Have been working hard this week building their final products. We have used a number of new tools and equipment in our brand new building. As a crew we need to have all work completed by Thursday 16th of May. If any students have any game work unfinished we will be running a product lab in extended study for everyone to get caught up.
All students showing courage! Courage is defined as ‘the ability to do something that frightens one; bravery’
Outstanding explanations from the previous expedition came from Raven and Corey who showed a great depth of knowledge when presenting past work.
As a crew we discussed the skill of presenting information and we debated the truth behind the famous Mark Twain quote:
‘ There are two types of public speakers in the world,
those who get nervous, and liars’
It was great to see all crew members contribute, and show our visitors from Denmark what XP East courage is all about!
Students in C24 have their end of case study assessment on Wednesday 17/04/19 this week. This will be an exam of 1-6 mark questions and a combination of the work we have been doing on:
For revision students will be able to use the Case Study 2 resources on the expedition website and the explore further page on the website also.
Expedition Website High Voltage
Crew Mandela have had a great week in terms of HOWLS. The whole crew have made huge improvements with working towards 4.0 in work hard. We had a weekly crew focus to ensure that all students get their hand up in sessions as much as possible! We then had a session with a focus on how messages can be misinterpreted by others, even when students are trying their hardest to pass on the correct information. Watch the video below to get a feel of the topic of discussion had.
In addition we also had a joint crew session with crew Turing who were fantastic with taking part in a crew led table tennis tournament.
Thanks to crew Turing for showing so much sportsmanship!
