XP East

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Yesterday afternoon myself and a few students, Charlie, Marcus and Lewis planted some oak saplings donated by Martin, our school cook.

We planted them at the back edge of the field behind XP East. We will have to keep them regularly watered as the earth is very dry after the summer.

The digging was quite difficult so when we’d finished we went into the student kitchen for some well earned toast and jam.

There are quite a few items in our stockpile of lost property at XP East. I suspect most of it has come back from Y8’s Outward Bound adventure! Could you please have a look to see if you recognise anything and send your child to collect by Friday 24th September.

Any items that haven’t been collected by then will be donated to charity or disposed of appropriately.

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A new Crew Leader and a Crew Mascot = Twice the Fun!

In the first week of the 2021 school year the whole of C24 spent a bracing day re-establishing old relationships and discovering new ones on a walk from North Landing to South Landing at Flamborough Head. It was Mrs Desborough’s first opportunity to spend some quality time with Crew Mandela, after being handed the reins by Mr Smith.

As they walked along the cliff tops, every member of the Crew took time to speak with Mrs Desborough about every thing from their goals for year 11 to their favourite order from the local takeaway. Enroute they stopped to watch seals swimming and sunbathing, swallows swooping over the grassy fields and Mr Shakesby trying to trick everyone in to carrying a rock.

Shortly after lunch Mrs Desborough and a couple of other members of Crew Mandela stopped to admire the offerings at a typical seaside gift shop. Amongst the array of bobbing turtles, clay seals and moles one particular ornament stood out. After some brief laughter it was obvious that this bargain buy was destined to be Crew Mandela’s mascot for year 11. Thankfully Mrs Desborough managed to get him home safely, ready to take pride of place in the Crew room.

Crew Mandela cannot wait to share the escapades of the newly christened (by democratic vote) Chunkz Evangelos and Mrs Desborough cannot wait to share the rest of year 11 with this fantastic Crew!

#WeAreCrew

Thank you to parents and students in Y9 and Y10 at XP and XPE for expressing an interest in the optional fieldwork to Madrid and for submitting a deposit. Due to an overwhelming (and pleasantly surprising!) demand for places we have now more than exceeded the number of places available.

As a result, we are sorry to announce that as of now we are closing the Madrid deposit Parent Pay account. This is due to high demand, far higher than we had expected, and we have taken the decision that Year 10 (C25) will be given priority for this optional fieldwork, as this should have taken place last year, but could not go ahead due to national Covid restrictions.

For Year 9 (C26) we will select students through a randomiser later in the week, contacting you with the outcomes, with the option of a refund on the deposit, or going on a reserve list, should your son / daughter not be randomly chosen. Again, we would like to thank you for showing interest in this optional fieldwork, and for parents of Year 9, we will be in touch with you shortly.

Thank you.

Getting to know each other!

Our first couple of days we spent some time having fun and getting to know each other. We played some games and had a ball.

What is Kindness?

Our focus this week was looking at kindness. What does kindness mean? What does kindness look like?

We decided to deliver small acts of kindness to the general public that we had made. These included painted rocks, postcards with kind messages on, origami flowers or butterflies, pieces of art and ALL SORTS of lovely ideas from the kids.

As a whole year group we gathered our gifts together and headed to Lakeside shopping centre for the afternoon where all the children showed massive amounts of courage as they offered out their gifts.

When we returned to school, the children did some reflecting on how they felt they had impacted on someone else’s day with their act of kindness. They made scrapbooks of the beautiful work they had produced and handed out.

I throughly enjoyed my first week being part of Crew Da Vinci and the week following was only going to get better. X

During our first week as Crew NHA, the students spent a lot of time getting to know one another by playing games and doing team building activities. We started off by making name tags for our crew wall so that everyone in XP East know who’s in crew NHA. To go alongside our name tags, crew also made some pledges to start the year off, a pledge is something that the students promise to themselves, one of these were “I pledge to always be nice to everyone”, another being “I pledge to not get stressed about new things” and “I pledge to work hard in all lessons”. I and the rest of crew will hold each student accountable for their pledge, therefore students will be supporting one another.

As part of our micro adventure on the first week, the students in Crew NHA made some pieces of work to go inside our time capsule. As a crew we will be adding things into our time capsule throughout the year, I will then keep this safe and the students will look back at it in year 11. Inside our time capsule. The students also created a letter to their future self and a drawing of themselves to look back at in year 9 after their passage presentations.

Another piece to add to our micro adventure was building bridges out of paper, we made this into a competition and the winner was the team who’s bridge held the most weight. The team that won was team chicken nuggets! Each group worked really hard on plans and the actual making of their bridge. We had a brilliant first week at XP East!

Every Friday we do flexible Fridays, this is time for getting things done that we might not have finished through the week. So the first Friday was spent finishing off any unfinished work but we also managed to get into the sports hall and have some fun doing just dance!

As a crew we have had a fantastic start to XP East and I am really looking forward to supporting these amazing students through to the end of year 11!

We are pleased to announce that we are now finally (!!!) able to take the students of E27 on fieldwork, to enhance their understanding of the Humanities aspect of our latest expedition: Being Human.  On Thursday 7th October, we will be leaving XP at approximately 8.15am to travel to Liverpool’s Royal Albert Docks. 

There, one class will visit the International Slavery Museum to research the impact of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, having examined how the Slave Trade was perpetuated by the expansion of the British Empire. The other class will spend this time at The Museum of Liverpool, taking part in a workshop that explores how the docks were ‘The Gateway to the World’ in terms of trade, empire and immigration. After lunch, the two classes will swap over.

Students should aim to arrive at school at 8am promptly, in order to register, check-in and board the coach, to allow for a prompt departure. Students will need to bring sufficient water and a packed lunch, as well as a few snacks. Students who are entitled to a free school meal, can order one via this Google Form, or by communicating that they would like one to their Crew Leader or Humanities teacher. Please note that we are a nut-free school, so nothing should contain nuts. Fizzy drinks and energy drinks are not permitted. As always, we expect students to leave no trace of their visit or time on the coach, by clearing away any litter they may have.

Students need to wear sensible clothing and footwear, and a waterproof coat is advised incase of any rain whilst we are walking between the museums, and to and from the transport. Any medication students require should be labelled with their name and passed to a member of staff.

We aim to have the students back at school at 5.30pm. However, depending on the traffic, it may be earlier or later than that time. Please check the website for updates on the day; students will be allowed to communicate their expected arrival time with parents if they have a mobile phone, from the coach.

We can’t wait to again be able to offer quality fieldwork that is one of the defining features of an education within the XP Trust! If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to email me using the email address [email protected]. Alternatively, feel free to contact your child’s Humanities teacher or their Crew Leader.

Mrs. McCarthy