Sensory Exploration In Room 10

Since returning to school after the summer holidays, we have been lucky enough to be able to enjoy the extended period of warm weather as we have reflected on our Summer holidays and some of the different activities we may have done. In particular we have thought about going to the seaside and have enjoyed exploring different themes alongside the Julia Donaldson story “What the Ladybird Heard at the Seaside”. We have engaged in a variety of sensory activities, including exploring sand (some ground up cereal), enjoyed feeling slimy seaweed (leaves collected from the playground and fresh runner beans) and of course enjoyed some water play whilst thinking about the different creatures that live in the sea. We have demonstrated our attention and listening skills, as well as communication (we especially liked when the whale splashed its grey tail!)

Houses and homes with Room 10

Our topic this term is “Houses, Homes and Buildings”, which we’re exploring through the story “In Every House, On Every Street”.

We started the term with a big focus on understanding the concepts of “house” and “home”, including playing communication games with our photos on the symbol for home and making cereal box houses. Our numeracy focus for this term is building with blocks, and the engagement with communication resources for this topic as well as the understanding of directional language has been brilliant. Our favourite prompt is definitely “knock it down!”

We’ve explored what we do in the kitchen, with communication games exploring who is in the kitchen (“me!”), moving to songs about baking, food art and craft and some fabulously messy sensory play! Bucket time that week whisked up a bowl of bubbles, had a cake splat and a flying balloon of flour!

We’ve also used this theme as a chance to understand our daily routines. We’re learning about what we need to have to go home, such as our bags and coats, and building independence with accessing them.

What makes a house a home? The relationships! We’ve built our confidence talking about the people around us and our comfort sharing preferred activities and taking turns, and have been developing our shared attention skills with our Attention Autism sessions.

We’re only just getting started! Look out for bathroom week, we’ll be making a splash!

Up, Up, Up in Room 10!

Our flight study has continued exploring a new body study, this time “Up, Up, Up!” about flying in a hot air balloon.  We’ve interacted with this story through story massage, aided language boards and expressive arts and movement activities.  We’ve had parachute play to replicate our own hot air balloon ride too!

Our bucket time sessions have explore vocabulary from the story, we’ve aimed paper planes at targets, sat inside a “hot air balloon” in class, made a “bird” with mouldable soap and feathers and raced around the room on outdoor play equipment (thank you P.E.!).  We’ve also had some fabulously messy sensory play sessions – I’m sure there’ll be more of those!

Through all of these we have built fabulous extended attention and communication skills, transferring skills we developed from our last book study to a new context.

We’ve also had some seasonal fun added in there, with pancake themed activities for Pancake Day (including a pancake toss for bucket time!) and a Mother’s Day theme for bucket time at the moment – fingers crossed our game of “Don’t wake mum!” passes on the correct message for this weekend!

(Most of the resources mentioned above are on our Room 10 Google Classroom for families if you wish to continue this at home.)

3, 2, 1 … Blast Off!

Since returning to school after the new year, we have been exploring our new theme of flight with the story “Space Song Rocket Ride”.  (We’ve shown such fabulous engagement that we’re going to extend this story for another week!)

We’ve listened to the story being read, supported with story massage, and used aided language boards to develop our communication around the story.  Some of us have been learning to focus our visual attention in the direction of the symbols, others tapping them on the sheet, and some of us saying the words shown!

We’ve role-played a rocket launch, with our seats moving as we prepare for blast off!  We’ve then explored music and movement recreating the main movement from the story – spinning!

We’ve explored our early listening skills with related songs, exploring reacting to familiar sounds and showing recognition of rhythm and in some cases understanding some of the words – blast off!!

We’ve had space themed bucket times too.  For stage one we’ve had foam rockets, popping aliens and a flying ball zooming into space over our heads!  Stage two we had three little men in a flying saucer with balloons, and the balloons flew off as each little man decided to fly away!  Stage three however was a clear favourite – zoom, zoom, zoom, with a rocket ride on a wheelie chair!

(Resources for many of these activities can be found on our class Google Classroom for anyone wanting to try ideas out at home too!)

Where will our flight topic take us next?

Merry Christmas from Room 10

Our learning has definitely embraced the festivities!

In literacy, our story took a festive turn as we explored “Supertato presents Jack and the Beanstalk” and “Supertato: Evil Pea Rules”, exploring pantomime and snowy themes!  We set up our own performance space and dressed up as different characters, engaged in a snow themed bucket time, and that’s not to mention the real stuff making an appearance!

In expressive arts we’ve been drumming to festive tunes, and our rhythm has been fabulous!  We’ve also been working hard on our Christmas show performance, practicing our dance moves (and letting supporting staff know what we like best to help us dance – we’ve been loving ribbons, pom poms, scarves and soft toy Santas!  We worked hard to make our Christmas video, which played in the background for our performance.  You can see our video here: https://youtu.be/Q7adWXCrDTc

We’ve also developed our classroom space, with a new sensory corner, cosy area and mini library, which are making for a lovely cosy atmosphere for the end of term!  We plan to make full use of this with a pyjama movie afternoon for the end of term!

Wishing all our families a lovely holiday!

Adventures with Supertato in Room 10

Room 10 have been very busy immersing themselves in this term’s book study, Supertato!

Week one we introduced ourselves to Supertato with Super Squad, with a birthday cake themed playdough for sensory play and a birthday themed bucket time. We introduced story massage and found this has positively supported engagement in story activities for our class – any Room 10 families wanting to try this at home can find lots of resources on our class Google Classroom.

Week 2 we explored the original Supertato story, with Evil Pea playdough sensory play, bouncing and spinning movement activities and lots of messy jelly fun for our Monday literacy session. Our Monday sessions have seen us teaming up with Room 9, which is a fab opportunity for us to practice our social skills with a larger group of friends.

Week 3 we checked out Supertato: Books Are Rubbish, creating masterpieces with glow in the dark paint, built and knocked down towers, engaged in torch play, glow sticks and light up toys for bucket time, and a jelly obstacle course for stage three (shifting attention and turn-taking), which wasn’t anywhere near as messy as it could have been!

Last week we had a bubble exploration session with veggies hiding in the foam, bubble blowing art, bubble wrap art, bubble popping movement activities and bubble sensory play. We even had a bubble themed bucket time! This gave some fabulous opportunities to not only explore this week’s Supertato story, Bubbly Troubly, but also gave us a chance to explore core communication skills (MORE bubbles please!) and practice regulation skills (relaxed breathing with blowing bubbles). Not to mention lots of fun!

All of this is alongside the focused efforts on settling in to a new class and building relationships with others around us. We’ve had some great fun with our Friday jam sessions with Room 9, we suspect the fun could be heard for some distance but that’s just part of the fun – we’ve been making friends, exploring rhythm and practicing our early signing skills.

Where will our Supertato adventures take us next? Watch this space …

A Hole in the Bottom of the Sea

Last term, Room 10, as part of their topic project, were exploring the story “A Hole in the Bottom of the Sea”!

We’ve explored fast and slow with movement games in class, to link with the lyric “grows at speed”.  We’ve investigated capacity with a range of containers with water and other sensory resources, including several containers with holes in, to build our understanding of of the hole in the story.  We’ve played with light (including with adapted switches so we could control them) and reflective materials to support understanding of one story feature – the sun!

Alongside this we’ve been busy with a wide range of broader learning.  We loved choosing pancake toppings for pancake day and our science project for that week involved trying to get felt “pancakes” to our target, which was great fun!  A particular highlight of the last few weeks has been sessions on the adapted bikes with Salvi from P.E. – the effort and enthusiasm from the whole class has been fabulous!

Developing the Outdoor Space

Our Outdoor Learning team- Roddy and Sharon- have been working hard to develop our outdoor space. The latest addition is two planter benches. Lots of us have already enjoyed sitting in the sun on them. Room 6 worked hard to get the planters ready for planting by drilling drainage holes in the trays. Room 10 then filled the planters with compost ready for the plants to go in. We are very impressd with the work these classes have been doing. The planters look fantastic and we are very excited to see how things grow.

Well done everyone!

Bucket Time And Books In Room 10!

Room 10 have responded fabulously to lots of change recently and have enthusiastically immersed themselves into a new term.  We have started to run “bucket time” sessions in our class, and the response so far has been brilliant, from spontaneous shouts of “bucket” and “go!” to fantastic engaged visual attention.  Indeed the spoken, signed and AAC supported communication shared by the class throughout the day has been very impressive!

Our topic this term is “books and stories”, and we’ve been working hard on two projects.  We’ve each been starting work on our own sensory story, but we’ve paused that for a moment whilst we video one of our favourite stories.  Our favourite part so far has been playing hide and seek like the animals hiding in our story!  We’ve also recreated the sea with our parachute and sensory lighting.

We’ve also been working hard on both target work and independence skills.