Category: Room 9

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.

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 9 dived into their new water topic with an exploration of the story of “The Little Mermaid”.  We’ve danced to “Under the Sea” as we’ve explored listening skills, shared our likes and dislikes about the story, designed our own mermaids (and underwater scenes for them to swim through) and acted out simple scenes.  Our numeracy activities followed the story of Ten Little Mermaids and during our Makaton song sessions we learned the “Mermaid Song” – some of us do a fabulous impression of singing mermaids!  We also have explored lots of different sea themed sensory play opportunities and interactive board games.

In amongst the joy of the January term we had plenty of snow, so we brought that into the class for some joyful play opportunities (and sneaky relationship-building, social skills and communication learning!).

We’ve recently moved onto our next story and book study, “A Hole in the Bottom of the Sea”, which between the music and the toy shark used to support understanding we have been loving so far!

We have also been voting for which story we would like to explore for the last few weeks of the term – at the moment, “The Snail and the Whale” is in the lead, but there’s one more vote to go, so watch this space!

In Room 9 last term we explored different Winter Festivals and how they are celebrated. 

We decorated the classroom, with lights, tinsel, and a few window pictures.  Our story study was “Dear Santa”, our comprehension work asked who is hiding in the Christmas present, our listening tasks explored moving to Christmas music, our numeracy activity counted elves.  Our morning choices included lots of dressing up options alongside puzzles, colouring and decorations.

Our Makaton song sessions included plenty of Santa getting stuck in the chimney, Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer, and wishing a merry Christmas.  For bucket time we had a dancing Christmas tree, racing Santa, novelty glasses, snowman splat, and for stage three a chance to decorate the Christmas tree and chased Santa!

As part of our journey to becoming a Rights Respecting School, we’ve explored a wider range of Winter Festivals in class.  Between Christmas, Yule and Hannukah, we noticed that lights played a recurring role in many winter festivals, so we made and decorated our own tealight holders from salt dough whilst listening to Christmas and Hannukah songs.

We also collated this into a wee video which we are thrilled to share with you.

It’s “That Time of Year” in Room 9!  Earlier this month we decorated the classroom, with lights, tinsel, and a few window pictures.  We’ve been busy as ever – our story study has been “Dear Santa”, our comprehension work has asked who is hiding in the Christmas present, our listening tasks explored moving to Christmas music, our numeracy activity counted elves.  Our morning choices have included lots of dressing up options alongside puzzles, colouring and decorations.

Our Makaton song sessions have included plenty of Santa getting stuck in the chimney, Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer, and wishing a merry Christmas.  For bucket time we’ve had a dancing Christmas tree, racing Santa, novelty glasses, snowman splat, and for stage three a chance to decorate the Christmas tree and chased Santa!

As part of our journey to becoming a Rights Respecting School, we’ve explored a wider range of Winter Festivals in class.  Between Christmas, Yule and Hannukah, we noticed that lights played a recurring role in many winter festivals, so we made and decorated our own tealight holders from salt dough whilst listening to Christmas and Hannukah songs.

One more sneaky project for “That Time of Year” to look out for – Happy Holidays!

Our Disney topic has continued to bring to life a variety of magical tales. 

For Halloween week we explored “baddies” with the story of “101 Dalmatians”.  We danced to Cruella DeVil, found our photos hiding in the old DeVil house, made Dalmatian art, dressed up for our soft-start choices and had a pumpkin themed sensory play with red lentils (and communication boards!).  Our numeracy activity counted “Ten Little Monsters” and our spooky Halloween bucket featured a chance to make our own magic potion, and alongside the fun of seeing the bubbles when we combined ingredients it was also great to see how much more confident the class were to transition for a turn-taking activity.

We then moved on to “superheroes”, and who better than “The Incredibles” to animate the theme?!  We all enjoyed playing with superhero masks as our signifier for story time, so when we got to art we each had a chance to make our own superhero masks.   We sang superhero songs and looked out for our superhero selves flying across the interactive board.

Last week we explored the theme of “Princesses” with the story “Aladdin”.  We danced to songs from the film for our listening activities, spotted our photos flying across the interactive board on a magic carpet, counted Princesses for numeracy, for bucket time we were invited for a magic carpet ride, and in art we designed our own magic carpets.  Our messy play communication activity saw our princess picture on the tray with some amazing cornflake hair!

Where will our Disney adventures take us next?

We’ve had a busy start to the year in Room 9!  We started the term with lots of time to explore our new class and friends, using the story “The Pigeon HAS to go to School” as our story focus for the start of term.  As part of this we have been able to build relationships and establish routines, including lots of movement activities throughout the day and diverse communication opportunities.  We’ve had lots of fun with our daily communication games, water play and messy play have supported some fab interactions!

Since then we’ve started to explore our Disney theme for the term, starting with “Toy Story”.  We’ve added sound effects to our own rocket launch, created space art, played along to music from the film, spotted our photos in “space” on the interactive board, sung space themed songs, and more.  In numeracy we counted “Ten Little Aliens” as we read the story of the same name.  A particular favourite was our space themed bucket time where we were able to launch a rocket for stage three – we’re loving bucket time at the moment in Room 9!

Last week we explored “Finding Nemo” (with lots of water play and a very wet bucket time!), this week we’re looking at “The Lion King”.  We’ll be continuing to explore a different Disney story every week or two.

The pupils in Room 9 have been very busy getting prepared for Christmas. So busy in fact that they even made their own Christmas tree!

They had lots of messy fun making handprints and with some support from staff, they cut them out and created this fantastic and unique tree!