Author: Amy Dunnett

Room 9 have started to explore our new community theme for this term with a new book study.  We have been reading “Poppy Goes Shopping” by Suzanne Miell-Ingram and Tracey Upton (Singing Hands).

We have brought to life different parts of the story throughout our learning.  In numeracy we have had a shop role-play with symbol-supported shopping lists.  Some of our class even went for a walk to the local shops to buy resources for our sensory sessions.

Our Makaton song sessions have included “Five Currant Buns” and “Ten Fat Sausages” so as to link to the language of the stories (“shop” and “sausages” both featuring).

Perhaps our favourite feature of the stories though has been the pizza that Poppy bought (and ate!).  We have had pizza themed Bucket Time sessions, with Stage Three giving us all a chance to become a pizza!  We made our own mini pizzas for snack which we then ate whilst listening to the story.  We chose our own toppings –  cheese was very popular!  We’ve had pizza art, making our own pizza pictures, and pizza sensory play with basil, oregano and tomatoes in dough – the classroom smelt delicious.

We were very lucky to have the chance to meet the authors of our book study when Singing Hands came in to perform at Orchard Brae, they read the whole story with us and were very impressed by everyone’s signing!

Next week we will be moving on to another Signing Friends story, “Poppy’s Busy Week”, to explore even more features of our community.

The past couple of weeks Room 5 have been learning about and celebrating Ramadan and Eid al-Fitr. We have engaged in Ramadan-themed sensology sessions during which we tasted dates, enjoyed the visual experience of looking through a telescope for the new moon and smelled incense, as well as other sensory experiences. We painted pictures to depict the new moon in a night sky and enjoyed baking ma’amoul (biscuits with dates inside commonly eaten during Eid).

In Room 9 we’ve been exploring how to bring more play-based learning into our routines.  As part of this we introduced a wee “café”, which has been a massive success with our learners.  From spontaneous imaginative play, social interactions with our peers, applying new communication skills to building fine and gross motor skills, the café has impressed us all.  It has been so popular we have given it a name, and one pupil helped to design a banner to signpost our new classroom highlight!

We have also moved onto our final book study of the term.  After several rounds of pupil voting, “Tiddler” closely won against “The Snail and the Whale”, so “Tiddler” is now our story for the next few weeks.  We’ve enjoyed joining in with “Oh, no, he didn’t!” “Oh, yes, he did!” as we read along together, signing fish songs, exploring body percussion and rhythm in response to fish songs as part of our listening activities, and made our own fish for our reading records, choosing from painting or collage (or both, for some of our most enthusiastic artists!).

For World Book Day, the whole class team each dressed up as a different emotion from the story “The Colour Monster”, and we made sure to add some additional time for telling the story during the day.  Between enthusiastic performances from the class team and fascinating props, engagement was really high throughout.

Room 5 have been taking part in a sensory art project. This is a structured hour once a week which includes mindfulness practice, sensology and art. We spent the first four weeks exploring different objects and materials in order to show our preferences and make choices. These will then be used going forward to be able to create art. This week we made our first pictures using a mixture of oil paint and poster paint. The oil paint will dry with a bumpy texture which is great for those of us who are tactile learners. We had lots of fun creating our pictures and will continue this project all term. We hope you enjoy seeing some of our work!