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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.
Over the last few weeks, Room 17 have enjoyed different Christmas activities. We have enjoyed making various Christmas crafts, making and selling reindeer dust, building a gingerbread house and decorating our classroom. We were spoiled with our Christmas dinner, and then we also had a pizza party in class, which everyone thoroughly enjoyed! Finally, we had fun at our Christmas party on Monday and we are looking forward to seeing a very special visitor on Thursday!
Today we have another festive treat for you with days 9 and 10 of our Orchard Brae Advent Calendar.
For Day 9, Room 12 take you on a magical sleigh ride, accompanied by classical music from Troika. Everyone had lots of fun creating their journey after lots of hard work practising every day in school.
For Day 10, Room 7 undertake a fantastic sensory exploration of snow.
Room 19 were delighted to find themselves, along with some of our primary pupils, featured on the official Makaton countdown to Christmas. Check it out here:
Room 12 found out all about Diwali in November. We watched a powerpoint that told us all about it and then made Mehndi patterns. We used a variety of stampers to create our patterns on an arm template for our ASDAN unit about celebrations in different communities.
Howes Hoose pupils are continuing to work hard. Over the last few weeks, we have been busy packing food parcels for distribution. Also, focus has been on household tasks such as bed making and washing clothes.
Bike maintenance has begun and all the pupils are enjoying it and learning lots!
Room 16 had a brilliant time celebrating Dr Who Day on 21st November. We had a fun but messy time making our own tardis and taking turns to hide inside it. It looks like it may have crashed landed on far off planets a few times but it is still standing! We made scary monster masks too and listened to some of the different Doctor Who theme tunes from over the years.
Room 15 has been incorporating lots of festive activities recently (we definitely broke the no Christmas stuff before 1st December rule!).
We have spent a lot of time working on our expressive arts Christmas video, applying our communication, musical and dramatic skills (and having lots of fun). Our class elf helped us to talk about “snow”! We’ve finished the video this week and have really enjoyed watching it (on repeat, by popular demand!) and can’t wait to share it with you later this month.
This week we explored the ASDAN to decide how we want to decorate a room by creating our own Christmas tree – we each chose which decorations we wanted to add and glued them onto the tree, and it now adorns our classroom wall making the room feel a bit more festive! Our story this week has been Stick Man, and we made our own Stick Man from playground resources as part of our outdoor education sessions.
Our Attention Autism sessions this week have also had a Christmas theme – the dancing Christmas tree has been a firm favourite, and it has been fabulous to see the engagement and spontaneous communication this has motivated our learners to share – “more”! Our stage 4 activity today is making our Christmas cards.
Alongside lots of fun we equip our learners to better understand events around them and be able to communicate about them. We have also continued to use the “special activity” symbol to continue to build our resilience to changes in routine, which can be many at this time of year.
As our next website post will be after the holidays, the team in Room 15 want to pass on our best wishes for a happy, safe and restful break to all – Merry Christmas!
This week in room 19 we have been learning about St Andrew and some Scottish traditions. We’ve talked about some Scottish words, Nessie and tartans. Then we watched some videos of living statues pranking people.
Here are the links to the living statue videos we watched:
Some pupils dressed up as living statues and played pranks on the class team. Boo! Do try this at home! Cameras at the ready!
We were delighted to see one of our families recognised at the Scottish Learning Disability Awards 2020, winning the Family Carer and their Relative category. On their YouTube channel, Shahzad shares informative videos that are appreciated by people around the world, highlighting ways to support people with complex additional needs through caring for his brother.
