XP Gateshead

End of Term – Easter holiday

Wow what a fantastic term it has been and thank you so much to all those who came and supported our students at their PoL (Presentation Of Learning ) yesterday evening.

I think we can all agree that it was a special occasion and our students made us all proud. When I woke up this morning I was still thinking about the breadth and depth of learning covered in the expedition ‘Do Your Bit’ and the confidence of our students in talking about what they had learned. As someone said in their feedback “It was like an hour long living history show”.

We celebrated with students today in our community meeting and have read back to them many of the comments written by people in the 120 strong audience. I know they are proud of themselves as well.

Who would have thought that 6 months after opening our students would be presenting live to a large audience in the Herschel Building of Newcastle University.

Our thanks also to all of our experts who supported students in this expedition and also to Newcastle University and Professor David Leat for supporting us in use of the lecture theatre.

Over the Easter holidays

We are asking students to relax, rest, exercise, and Read Read Read with their newly borrowed books from our virtual library. 

We are also asking students to cook (with parents) and try out several recipes from the Jack Munroe cookbook in readiness for our final product for our expedition  – Staying Alive. Full instructions have been sent out to students via Google Classroom and crew leaders have gone through this with students today.

Happy Easter

As a small token of how proud we are of students we have bought all students an Easter egg which we presented to them in crew just after lunch. This is a present from our staff to our students.

We will be in touch before the start of next term if there is anything more we need to let families know about. In the meantime have a great Easter holiday and thank you so much for your continued support.

As usual if you have any questions please contact your child’s crew leader in the first instance.

We look forward to seeing you after the holiday on Tuesday 19th April at the usual time where we will be starting our next exciting expeditionary adventure.

Happy Easter from all the staff crew at XP Gateshead

 

Mark Lovatt

Principal

 

Dear Parents/Guardians

Welcome to our final week at XP Gateshead before the Easter break

Expeditions

DO YOUR BIT – Presentation of Learning

Students are currently working hard on their final product for their expedition “Do your bit” as they build towards their Presentation of Learning. This will be held at the Herschel Building at Newcastle University on Thursday 31st March at 6pm.

If you have not already done so, please complete this Google Form to indicate how many family members you will be bringing to the Presentation of Learning. 

Please note that we will be asking all participants to take a LFT on Thursday before joining us as we will be in an indoor setting and we would not like anyone to be ill over the holiday.

Please add your own details to the COVID Testing Google Form in the same way as you would for your child. This information will be held securely and then deleted following the event.

We’d appreciate it if you could also delay testing your child from Wednesday evening until Thursday morning before school this week if at all possible, we know many of you do this already.

Thanks in advance for your cooperation. We are determined to be able to welcome you to the event in as safe a way for you and your children as is possible.

STAYING ALIVE

In “Staying Alive” students will begin case study three. Case study three is about access to clean water. This is particularly relevant with recent stories in the press about sewage in our national rivers and also, according to the World Health Organisation, about a quarter of the world’s population still lacking access to clean water. Students will be learning to separate mixtures and will attempt to produce clean water from a mixture of sand and salty water by filtration, evaporation and condensation.

The final product for this expedition will be created in the week after the Easter break. I am delighted to announce that we will be working with the local community based charity, Edberts House, to donate ingredients/recipe boxes that our students will create. We will ask families for small voluntary contributions to these boxes from families so that across our 50 students we have two food boxes which will each feed a family in need for a week. Following the Easter break our students will walk to Edberts House to deliver these packages and hear more about the great work that they do with families in need. This will be a great opportunity for students to see first-hand the impact that their social activism and learning has in their community. Of course, given the current rise in cost of living, contributions will be voluntary and if support is needed in contributing, please do speak to your child’s Crew Leader.

To assist in planning the above, we will be giving students access to recipes from Jack Munroe’s book – “Cooking on a Bootstrap” and we would encourage parents to cook some of these meals with their son or daughter during the Easter holiday. More information on all of this on Thursday evening.

Crew

In crew this week students will continue to research suitable people after whom to name their crews. These will be people who have achieved great things and who display our character traits of courage, integrity, respect, craftsmanship and quality, and above all compassion. Students will research and present possible contenders to the rest of their crew who will decide on their crew name. Among names I have heard students mention so far are – Zelensky, Marie Curie, Malala Yousafzai, and Kurt Hahn. Crew presentations and student voting will take place after Easter and we will let you know what students decide.

Common Mission

Our first official session of Common Mission will begin this Thursday morning. This is student choice led and students will be learning about subjects as diverse as Mandarin and creative writing, and forensic science to coding and sports and exercise. Students will be setting their own Learning Targets (with support from teachers) and will present their learning as normal in due course. Students will be completing the “my interests” part of the Junior Award Scheme for Schools (JASS) as part of their study.

Extended Study and after school clubs

Extended Study and after school clubs will be running as normal this week.

• MONDAY: Sports / Extended study
• TUESDAY: Extended Study
• WEDNESDAY: Extended Study
• THURSDAY: Sports / Extended Study / Minecraft

Lateral Flow Testing

Please complete a Lateral Flow Test with your child on Sunday evening, and again on Wednesday evening or Thursday morning and complete our test results sheet with the results before sending your child to school.

Covid infections are increasingly high in the community and given the size of our setting this really helps us to keep everyone safe and for our school to remain open.

We really do appreciate your support. Timely completion of the Google Form is really helpful to us. If you can imagine, at 8.30 when students arrive, if there are a number of students that need to be tested this has an immediate impact on our staffing and also means that students miss part of Crew, which is such an important start to the day.

Now that the government has decided to remove the wearing of face coverings as one of the mitigation measures in schools, we are happy for students (and staff) to continue wearing masks if they feel more comfortable doing so. 

If you require any extra LFT kits please let us know. 

We will continue to keep doors and windows open for ventilation so students are advised to bring multiple layers to school to keep warm. This is how we look after each other – #wearecrew

Calendar dates

Our calendar can be found here.

As usual if you have any questions please get in touch with your child’s crew leader in the first instance.

Early Finish Friday

Please note that we will be finishing early this Friday and students will leave school at 1.30pm. This is to enable us to thoroughly clean up rooms and to re-stock equipment so we are ready to go again when students return on Tuesday 19th March.

We look forward to seeing family members that are  joining us at our presentation of learning at Newcastle University on Thursday evening and I would like to take this opportunity to wish all of our wider families, parents and students a Happy (and safe) Easter

 

Best wishes

Mark Lovatt

Principal

Dear Parents/Guardians

Welcome to another week at XP Gateshead

Expeditions

DO YOUR BIT – Presentation of Learning

Students are currently working hard on their final product for their expedition “Do your bit” as they build towards their Presentation of Learning to answer the guiding question “Why is it important we honour all those that sacrificed in WWI?”. This will be held at Newcastle University on Thursday 31st March at 6pm.

If you have not already done so, please complete this Google Form to indicate how many family members you will be bringing to the Presentation of Learning.

STAYING ALIVE

In “Staying Alive” students will complete their second case study which is about keeping warm, which is particularly topical in light of recent rises in fuel prices and heating bills. We will then begin case study three. Case study three is about access to clean water, again which is particularly relevant with recent stories in the press about sewage in our national rivers. Students will be learning to separate mixtures and will attempt to produce clean water from a mixture of sand and salty water by filtration, evaporation and condensation.

In both case studies we will be able to make connections to what many in Ukraine are enduring at the moment. These case studies are designed to help students to answer teh guiding question “Is survival sufficient?”.

The final product for this expedition will take place in the week after the easter break and I am delighted to announce that we will be working with the local community based Charity, Edberts House, to donate ingredients/recipe boxes that our students will create.

There will be more information about our ‘fight food poverty’ recipes soon, as we hope to encourage parents and children to try some of the recipes – watch this space.

Crew

In crew this week students will continue to research suitable people after whom to name their crews. These will be people who have achieved great things and who display our character traits of courage, integrity, respect, craftsmanship and quality, and above all compassion. Students will research and present possible contenders to the rest of their crew who will decide on their crew name. Among names I have heard students mention so far are – Zelensky, Marie Curie, Malala Yousafzai, and Kurt Hahn. Crew presentations and student voting will take place after Easter and we will let you know what students decide.

Robotics

Considering the short amount of time that our students have had their robotics kit, we are so proud of their efforts and achievements. In particular it was wonderful to hear of the way that they communicated with teams from other schools to agree strategies for the team challenges in the afternoon. At one point we were riding high in 7th place overall but in the end our students came 13th out of 16 entries. Look out NISSAN and Sunderland though because next year – “We’ll be back”.

HoWLs

This week teachers will be reviewing student Habits Of Work and Learning (HoWLs) as we update assessment information based on the learning behaviours in their lessons and communicate with students how well they are working hard, getting smart and being kind.

Staffing updates

From September 2022 and throughout the next year it will be unavoidable that some of my time is taken up preparing for our move into our permanent building in September 2023. As chunks of my time will be taken up working with the Department for Education, Architects and builders, the Trust have asked Mrs Mosley to share some of the Headteacher roles and functions. For this reason from next year we will operate a co-headship model with myself and Mrs Mosley sharing the role between us. Mrs Mosley will focus largely on continuing to develop staff and student crew and I will focus mainly on school strategy and performance. This change will take place from September 2022 and we will release more details about how this will work in practice later in the academic year.

Extended Study and after school clubs

• Extended Study and after school clubs will be running as normal this week.
• MONDAy: Extended study
• TUESDAY: Extended Study
• WEDNESDAY: Extended Study
• THURSDAY: Sports / Extended Study / Minecraft

Lateral Flow Testing

Please complete these this evening, and again on Wednesday.

COVID infections are still high in the community and rising again. Given our scale, an asymptomatic case in school could cause issues if it were to spread, for example in terms of being able to staff the school. Please continue to support us with lateral flow testing each Sunday and Wednesday evening and make sure you enter results into our website on each of these occasions.

We really do appreciate your support. Timely completion of the Google Form is really helpful to us. If you can imagine, at 8.25 once all students have arrived, if there are a number of students that need to be tested this has an immediate impact on our staffing and also means that students miss part of Crew, which is such an important start to the day.

Now that the government has decided to remove the wearing of face coverings as one of the mitigation measures in schools, we are happy for students (and staff) to continue wearing masks if they feel more comfortable doing so. 

If you require any extra LFT kits please let us know. 

We will continue to keep doors and windows open for ventilation so students are advised to bring multiple layers to school to keep warm. This is how we look after each other – #wearecrew

Calendar dates

Our calendar can be found here.

As usual if you have any questions please get in touch with your child’s crew leader in the first instance.

 

Best wishes

Mark Lovatt

Principal

 

Dear Parents/Guardians

Monday 14th March is a staff development day and students return to school on Tuesday 15th March at the normal time.

Accelerated Reader

Students this week will begin to choose books from our recently launched Accelerated Reader platform. This is part of our reading strategy at XP Gateshead and students have already completed a baseline assessment which will be used to steer children towards the most suitable books to support and challenge their reading. Accelerated Reader tracks what students are reading and Crew Leaders use this to ensure that students develop as readers.

Learning Expeditions

Students will also continue with their expeditions – in Staying Alive, they will begin case study two and consider the importance of staying warm, different energy stores, insulation and how heat energy transfers through conduction, convection and radiation. In Do Your Bit students are beginning to work on their final product and we would encourage you to talk to your children about this. We will have details on the Presentation of Learning very soon.

Next Expedition planning 

During our staff development days we have been working to plan and resource our next learning expedition – Top secret ! (That’s not what it’s called by the way, we’re just not telling anyone what it’s about yet). Students will begin this expedition after our Easter break.

Robotics

Students will be entering their robot for the Robotics competition on Wednesday of this week and will make their own way to the competition. Mr Said has been in touch with parents about arrangements for the day but as a reminder:

 

• 8.30 – 9:15 Teams arrive at NISSAN Sports Complex
• 16:30 – Teams ready for collection

Good luck to our students! They have worked so hard developing our inaugural XP Gateshead entry, including building the robot from scratch, building the practice field and coding and testing the robot in a virtual environment. Also we’d like to give a special appreciation to Dr Steve Bunce who has been working with the students as part of their Common Mission time each week. There will be many experienced teams at the competition so this will be a great learning experience for our students.

Student Assessment Information and reflective narratives

Families have now received their child’s report containing information on attendance, academic progress and HOWLs. You will also have received a second document with your child’s reflective narrative describing their own learning journey and containing comments from their crew leader. Please let your child’s crew leader know in the first instance if you have any questions or wish to follow anything up.

Extended Study and after school clubs

Extended Study and after school clubs will be running as normal this week.

• TUESDAY: Extended Study
• WEDNESDAY: Extended Study
• THURSDAY: Sports / Extended Study / Minecraft

Lateral Flow Testing

Please complete these on Monday evening this week  in readiness for return to school on Tuesday 15th.

COVID infections are still high in the community and rising again. Given our scale, an asymptomatic case in school could cause issues if it were to spread, for example in terms of being able to staff the school. Please continue to support us with lateral flow testing each Sunday and Wednesday evening and make sure you enter results into our website on each of these occasions.

Now that the government has decided to remove the wearing of face coverings as one of the mitigation measures in schools, we are happy for students (and staff) to continue wearing masks if they feel more comfortable doing so. 

If you require any extra LFT kits please let us know. 

We will continue to keep doors and windows open for ventilation so students are advised to bring multiple layers to school to keep warm. This is how we look after each other – #wearecrew

Safeguarding Review

Thank you to our parents for your fantastic support and overwhelming positive feedback in response to our safeguarding review – some of the comments literally brought tears to our eyes. We also received a very positive report from the Trust team and as ever will be using any feedback we received to do even more to ensure our students are safe and happy at XP Gateshead.

Calendar dates

Our calendar can be found here.

As usual if you have any questions please get in touch with your child’s crew leader in the first instance.

 

Best wishes

Mark Lovatt

Principal