Broad General Education
The Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) is Scotland’s education framework for ALL learners; its main aim is to enable children and young people to develop the four capacities; successful learners, confident individuals, responsible citizens and effective contributors. In Orchard Brae School each learner is enabled to become as independent as possible, developing skills for life, learning, leisure and where appropriate work. Our curriculum offer is personalised to each pupil throughout their learning journey, as we maintain a focus on positive future destinations.
Our learners in P1 – S3 work within Broad General Education (BGE) at a level and pace that is suited to their individualised needs. Personalised targets focus core skill development within Literacy and Communication, Numeracy and Health and Well Being. The ethos and life of the school community is structured to enable pupils to learn and practise life skills as part of their daily routines. Through interdisciplinary approaches and specialist courses, we offer real life learning contexts, deepening and practicing knowledge and skills within Expressive Arts, RME, Science, PE, Technologies and Social Studies. Interdisciplinary learning, through ‘Our world’ contexts over a 5 year cycle, facilitates pupils’ exploration, experience and learning which is practiced within community contexts, ensuring confidence and success is generalised and secure. Family learning is a vital part of our pupils’ success and, along with our termly learning challenges, we offer a range of workshops, activity nights and holiday schemes for families. Achievement and success is recognised and celebrated.
Room 5 have been on a very exciting class trip to Aberdeen Airport.
We all have a fantastic time! We got to go through security, go onto a plane and sit in the pilots seat, drive down the runway, visit the fire station and spray the water hose and of course see lots of planes and helicopters take off and land. George and Ali at Aberdeen Airport were brilliant tour guides!!!
Room 9 pupils appreciate our natural world.
They have observed Spring daffodils growing and produced these wonderful paintings depicting our class’s daffodils.
We have all looked at the paintings and commented on them. We all agree they are fabulous pieces of art.
Some pupils from Room 7 enjoyed a walk in the countryside today. We headed along the countryside path towards Kingswells and saw lots of exciting things. We took pictures of some of the animals and when we got back to school we used our Pixon and core vocabulary boards to talk about what we saw. We also practised our maths skills by counting aloud the number of animals. We saw 3 deer and 7 brown and white horses and far too many sheep and crows to count!!!
The pupils in Room 4 have been very busy exploring maths in a range of fun and practical ways. They have been exploring water and different coloured foams, and enjoyed working on measuring, weighing and comparing them as well as sorting by colour.
Follow us, Room 8, into an amazing journey through our world of rights along with Handa, from “Handa’s surprise” by Eileen Browne.
In the story, Handa, a girl from Kenya, took a surprise bowl of fruits on a journey to her friend Akeyo. Different animals pinched the fruits without Handa’s permission. There were many interesting animals and fruits to find out about, making the journey really fun. As Handa’s journey was about to end, a goat bumped into a tangerine tree, and filled up her empty bowl with tangerines. When she arrived at Akeyo’s village, that was a happy surprise for both Handa and Akeyo. Handa was amazed by the loss of the other fruits, and the presence of tangerines. There was a happy ending because Akeyo’s favourite fruit is tangerine and Handa brought them to him.
What made this story so wonderful was the beautiful describing words. It also introduced the theme of friendship and its importance, which is another positive asset to this story. The surprise at the end of the story added a comical twist that brought the happiness.
Altogether, this was a really engaging and entertaining book that was wonderful to listen to and made us smile. Furthermore, the book has given us the opportunity to learn about children’s rights, to explore and taste the fruits from Handa’s basket, and to speak about our uniqueness and importance.
However, our journey is not finished yet, so be ready for other adventures along with Handa and her friend, Akeyo.
Room 12 are beginning to create a wide variety of art work, inspired by Nuart in Aberdeen.
They have looked at images and videos relating to the work around Aberdeen and hope to go and view some of it in situ.
So far, they have explored the work of Hama Woods, Jan Vormann and Anders Gjennestad, some of which can be seen around Aberdeen. They have also explored techniques such as yarn bombing and the transient nature of chalk art.
Examples of the artist’ work and the map of locations can be found at: https://2019.nuartaberdeen.co.uk/
Last week some of our Secondary pupils attended a Football Tournament at Garioch Sports Centre. Once again we enjoyed the opportunity to socialise with young people from other schools and to compete against them in friendly competitions.
Room 12 celebrated May Day on 1st May. We crowned our May Queens and Kings and looked at a PowerPoint and videos of Morris and Maypole dancing. We played along with our bells. In pairs, we made Maypoles from cardboard tubes, stickers and crepe paper, and used playdough to ground them. We added play people for our display.
The children in Room 11 have been participating in a range of fun activities and learning how to keep healthy. They have been having fun at swimming, cooking and taking part in PE lessons. Some of them have been showing how competitive they are when playing curling.
All of them have been showing their responses to different smells and some of them have been very clear of what they like (mint, onion).
They have been having great fun exploring how their bodies work and what they can do when they really want and try.
Monday the 22nd of April was Earth Day. Class 6 took part in a scavenger hunt to see how many different items we could find when we were out in the community, relating to caring for the environment. We also managed to find a few in school too!
