As part of their work exploring Norton’s history, the children of 4EB have been getting creative!
Each child chose a pupil who attended Norton Junior School in 1939, the year the Second World War began, and created artwork inspired by that child.
By putting themselves in the shoes of a child from the past, 4EB have made a wonderful connection with Norton’s history, bringing the faces and stories of a generation from nearly 90 years ago back to life.
What if teaching Maths could be about more than covering the curriculum? What if every young person could leave school believing that they really are a mathematician? At XP Gateshead, that’s the ambition.
Joining XP Trust means becoming part of a community that does things differently. We believe education is about more than passing exams.
If you want to teach in a school where your creativity is valued and your work makes a difference, XP Trust is the place for you.
Find out more about the role here: https://xptrust.org/xp-gateshead-maths-teacher/
This week, Year 6 have really cracked on with our product: measuring accurately, cutting precisely, gluing and constructing. It’s all looking really exciting and the children have been fantastic, showing great maturity and pride along the way!
In their first lesson of the new half-term, Year 6 dived straight into tag rugby to practice their evasion and reactions as part of a lesson on attacking and defending. In the lesson, children worked strategies to avoid being tagged when in possession of the ball, such as using footwork and feinting, and also how to be an effective defender, by remaining light on your toes to react quickly to the attacker’s movements in defence. Once the children had practiced 1v1 situations, they moved onto games where two defenders worked against an attacker, where they used strategy to tag the attacker by remaining in a defensive line. A great lesson to begin our new scheme in PE!
5SO have been busy constructing the frame for their Earth and Sun models this week. They learnt how to saw safely and accurately using bench hooks and junior hack saws and then sanded their wood to create a smooth finish.
This week, 5HJ have been developing practical skills by measuring, marking and sawing pieces of wood as the first stage in creating their space models. They used rulers to practise accuracy before carefully using saws to cut the wood.
The activity developed their measuring skills, hand-eye coordination and safe tool handling, while encouraging independence, concentration and precision.
This week in Science, Year 6 have been diving into the fascinating world of simple machines to explore how mechanisms like levers, pulleys, and gears reduce the force needed to move objects and change the direction of forces. Working collaboratively in small teams, our young engineers took a systematic approach to investigating how gears interact with one another. They set up hands-on experiments, communicated effectively and measured their results carefully to uncover how variations in gear size affect force and movement.
Through their collaborative experiments, Year 6 drew brilliant scientific conclusions about how gears function: when a smaller gear with fewer teeth turns a larger gear with more teeth, the larger gear rotates more slowly but produces significantly greater force.
Conversely, driving a smaller gear results in greater speed but less output force. We are immensely proud of Year 6’s scientific curiosity and teamwork—be sure to ask your child at home how these gear principles make pedalling a bike uphill so much easier!
Here’s a selection of beautiful work from across the XP Trust!
To read about other stories from across the XP Trust, visit xptrust.org.
Wise Wednesday @ Norton Infants
Authors, illustrators and now educators! @ Norton Juniors
C33 engage with Bayeux Tapestry live @ XP East
Write to us at [email protected] – we want to hear about it, write about it and celebrate it!
We are looking for courageous educators to join our Crew at XP Doncaster and guide transformative Learning Expeditions.
Help our students grow their character, create beautiful work, and achieve academic success.
