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 11 had great fun celebrating Comic Relief. We decorated red nose pictures and tried on special red nose day glasses. Don’t you think we look fabulous?
The children in Room 4 have been creating their own colour amongst the stars. They used papier mache to make planets and then decorated them in different colours.
Pupils enjoyed taking part in the curling festival at Curl Aberdeen. We rotated around 6 different stations and had the opportunity to try different activities. Everyone tried pushing the stones at skittles, targets and playing a game of curling. We all had different strengths: some of us were very good at aiming for the centre of the target, gently pushing the curling stones with just the right amount of force, while others were very good at skittles due to our ability to push the curling stone a long way.
The pupils in Room 2 have been working extremely hard on their book study of ‘The Colour Monster’. The poor Colour Monster is all mixed up, his colours are all over the place and therefore his feelings are too.
We explored each colour and feeling by initially doing Sensology work exploring objects of each colour and listening to pieces of music, mainly classical, which helped create the appropriate atmosphere. After this we did a BIG art session for each colour and feeling which was so much fun!
When we explored yellow and happiness, we used our favourite art techniques. We rolled balls down ramps, crinkled cellophane, used the salad spinners, shook pasta in a metal tin, painted with beads – each child used their favourite technique before happily exploring those of their friends. There were SO many smiles in class!
Blue brought the feeling of sadness and we did watery art. We were all amazed to listen to, feel and look at what happened when we blew straws into bubbly water! We also sprayed paint from bottles and made incredible marble prints.
During our angry, red session we made lots and lots of noise! We stamped our feet in the paint as hard as we could and banged on drums and cymbals…paint went flying everywhere!
As we discovered about black and fear, we made ‘scary’ creatures scurry over our bodies before dipping their feet in black paint and make them scurry over our paper! Some pupils were mesmerised while we dropped the heavy, clanking chain onto the floor after dipping it in paint and there was some amazing requesting for ‘more’.
There was a lovely, gentle atmosphere in class when we explored green and calm. We made balloons fall from a height and beautiful patterns from gymnastics ribbons made beautiful marks on our paper. A definite highlight was waving the big green cloth to create a textured collage; we started off by waving it gently although many pupils communicated that they liked it going fast fast fast!
We are very proud of our pupils for their fantastic engagement and new learning from this project. We will check back in with the last little bit of our Colour Monster book study work before the end of term!
Our amazing Makaton Choir, dancers and drummers had great fun entertaining the whole school with their favourite songs as a fundraiser for Comic Relief.
We are also raising money through our World Book Day Book and DVD trolley and all the money received will be donated to Comic Relief. Total raised so far is £240.
The students and staff in Howes Hoose have also been busy selling red noses around the school. They have raised an amazing £90 and they have donated a further £50 from their soup making enterprise. A huge well done to everyone in Howes Hoose for their total of £140! (Photos to follow!)
We were asked by some of our parents to help raise awareness of World Kidney Day on the 14th March. Kidney disease affects approximately 850 million people worldwide and the campaign Move4Kidneys highlights the importance of exercise in helping us keep our kidneys healthy.
We decided to get involved at Orchard Brae by hosting a special Move4Kidneys disco on Tuesday with Kev from SoundLightSensory, encouraging everyone to develop their awareness of kidney health by getting active and having fun.
Rooms 6 & 7 have been having lots of fun exploring Our Colourful World through both our play and work. We have enjoyed participating in a range of colour matching and sorting activities and enjoyed using the Interactive Board for some tasks. We have also managed to find lots of different colours through our play. We’ve even been using our Pixon boards to choose and chat about colours!
Room 9 pupils have really enjoyed our topic this term – Our Colourful World. We have made Elmer the Elephants using recycled materials, we are currently re-using plastic bottles and turning them into colourful vases and recently we did self-portraits. Our portrait gallery is on display outside our classroom for other pupils and adults to enjoy.
We have been playing with oil paints in class just to see how strong and vibrant the colours are. The paints were quite smelly, but the final work was fabulous.
On World Book Day the children from Class 10 brought in books from home, looked again at some of our class books and took the opportunity to spend time enjoying some of the books they had taken out of the local library. We had the chance to share some of our favourite books from home which we all enjoyed.
