Category: Secondary Department

Welcome to the Secondary Department

The secondary department has 8 classes and pupils follow the principles of Curriculum for Excellence: a broad general education in S1-S3 and the Senior Phase in S4- S6.   The curriculum is varied, relevant, challenging, enjoyable and adapted to meet our pupil’s individual needs.  Pupils also visit a range of specialists, have access to relevant therapeutic inputs and participate in wider community events.

Hair Washing for ASDAN

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Some of the pupils in Room 16 chose that they wanted to learn how to wash hair as part of their ASDAN award. They practised brushing hair, rinsing, applying shampoo and conditioner and drying it. We were all very impressed with how careful everyone was – there was no shampoo in anyone’s eyes! The end results were fantastic and there were two very happy staff customers.

Big and Small in Room 17

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Room 17 have been busy exploring the idea of big and small. We have been applying this concept to our everyday life skills; for example, looking at big kitchen utensils and small kitchen utensils; cutting fruit into big pieces and small pieces. We have also had good fun exploring this with different sizes of balls and we have been practicing our turn taking skills at the same time. We have also been decorating our outside area with the idea of big and small too. We have been painting big rocks and small rocks to make a pretty class snake; and making wind chimes by choosing big twigs and small twigs! Our outside area is looking much more welcoming now! 

National Numeracy Day: 19th May 2021

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19th May is National Numeracy Day. There are events throughout the day on the National Numeracy website:

https://www.nationalnumeracy.org.uk/numeracyday

Numeracy is all around us. It helps us to understand the world and process our environment. Colours, patterns, shape, size and texture are all related to numeracy and play can support our early understanding of these concepts. As our pupils develop, we focus on functional numeracy, learning about time through our daily routine, money in practical situations such as knowing we have to pay in the shop, measurement in HE and outdoor learning. Numeracy skills are developed across the curriculum.

There are lots of things you can do at home to support your child’s numeracy development. Why not some of these activities? For Primary / early Secondary learner here are some ideas. Follow the link below for more:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EIwt0gKHQ-0tJ7N1p1J9XeYrV3OBIUOx0KXplmkf5zQ/edit?usp=sharing

For our Senior Phase learners:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSl3vrEw2_6rLo8diWVck-jzCk2OMK5RZ81ZAe6isXMGMf1dWo2qD-xW6I0En-8f9Tq6ReYeie3tIdI/pub

We’d love to see how you use numeracy at home. Please share any photographs or comments by e-mail to: gw19russellclare@ab-ed.org

Settling Back in Room 12

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We have been getting back into the swing since returning to school.

One thing we have enjoyed is our Wednesday yoga sessions. Here we see one of our young people really enjoying the one to one yoga with Hannah who understands the needs of our class perfectly. One of our class always greets her with “Namaste”, now without prompting!

We have been choosing what we would like to do in class time. This can be through use of symbols, pictures, signing, verbally or in the case of this picture, by switch. Here, one of our pupils is choosing the song he would like to hear.

Celebrating Star Wars Day in Room 16

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Room 16 have been celebrating Star Wars day! We made a google form questionnaire together to find out what everyone’s favourite Star Wars character is. We showed our results using bricks to represent the number of votes for each character. We then ordered them from the most popular character to the least popular character. Chewbacca is officially Orchard Brae’s favourite character!