Category: Qualifications and Awards

We offer a large range of qualifications and awards throughout the senior phase and these are open to all pupils in S4-S6.  The teaching staff ensure that pupils are part of meaningful and relevant curriculum and lace the qualifications through a bespoke pathway allowing for challenge, enjoyment and to meet individual’s targets.

Enjoying our Learning in Secondary

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Burns Celebrations to start the week

We’ve had another busy week of remote learning. Starting on Monday with our whole school Burns Day Celebration, the week was started with great enthusiasm!

Daily Circle Time

To keep our routine going, many classes continue to do daily circle time. Some of our learners have their own circle time packs at home to support the familiar routine, others use the class slides to provide structure. It’s great to receive feedback on how our learners are getting on: ‘He thoroughly enjoys circle time.’

For one young man, circle time is also an opportunity to practise his bench sitting.

Personal Independence and Life Skills

We continue to develop independence in personal care. Staff take time to support us in doing things for ourselves. Handwashing is very important during a pandemic!

We’ve been cooking and baking. There was some delicious French Onion Soup on offer this week and beautiful golden shortbread. Look out Masterchef, here we come!

Expressive Arts

We enjoyed art, PE, drumming and music through Makaton Choir. A very detailed drawing was done to decorate a drum for a music session with Keith – the drawing is of a hunter being chased by an African lady that is protecting the animals!

We also took time to relax, both indoors and out.

    Working Hard

    We worked hard on a range of learning activities and tasks, some online and some more practical.

    One of our senior pupils made an amazing cat house as part of her SQA work. I think you’ll agree, this is for one very lucky cat!

      Assembly

      Finally, to round off the week we had an Assembly. We talked about mental health and the theme ‘Express Yourself’. Staff shared the ways that they express themselves and show that they’re unique. The slides are available to view in the Google Assembly classroom for anyone that was unable to join us. Our challenge for the next assembly on 12th February is to share a photo of us doing something that we enjoy – anything goes!

      Remote Learning in Secondary

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      It’s been an interesting couple of weeks for both staff and pupils in our Secondary Department. With a new round of remote learning we’ve slipped back into things a little easier. We’ve got lots of activities on offer within our Google Classrooms and we’re seeing more pupils engaging with this. Circle time and stories are proving popular and it’s great to see our young people getting involved in helping around the home.

      Although we have some sessions ‘live’, such as Makaton Choir (every Monday at 2 pm) and Assembly (1:30 pm on Friday 29th January), other activities are in the form of pre-recorded video or materials that can be accessed at a time of your convenience. We do appreciate that family life is busy, everyone juggling remote learner(s) with other commitments, so we invite you dip in and out when it suits your schedule.

      Here are a few photos from our remote learning over the last couple of weeks. If you’d like your child to be featured, please let the class teacher know that you’re happy for your photographs to be shared.

      Life Skills: Home Economics
      Outdoor Education
      Sharing our learning through Google Meets
      Circle Time
      Expressive Arts and Communication
      Life Skills: Household tasks and shopping

      We’re learning in everything we do. Please ask your class teachers if you need any further support.

      Willow Wreaths – Handmade by Room 18

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      Room 18 have been learning to work with cut willow branches.

      1.       Stripping the branches

      The thinnest branches are the easiest to work with so we had to pull them off the bigger branches!

      2.       Making wreaths

      We used the branches to make circles and then start wrapping other branches around to make Christmas decorations. It was very fiddly and takes a bit of getting used to.

      3.       Taking Photos

      For our SQA and ASDA units, we are learning to take photos on the ipads. We thought this was a good time to practice our skills, we all took photos of each other working.

      4.       TaDa! The finished product

      This was a fiddly task and took some concentration. We are very proud of the small wreaths we have made. They will look fab when we decorate our classroom next week!

      Music in Room 17

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      As part of our ASDAN and SQA work, Room 17 have been exploring a variety of musical instruments. We have been deciding which instruments we like best and which ones we aren’t so keen on! We have enjoyed playing the different instruments to some of our favourite songs. We have now chosen our favourite instrument and will be practising it for something special coming up later in the term!

      Room 16 Learning to Care for Plants

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      As part of our ASDAN work we are learning how to care for a plant. We had fun smelling and tasking a variety of different herbs. There were a few we weren’t a fan of and we made some funny faces when we tasted them! Everyone chose their favourite one to look after for the rest of the term and we will be checking them regularly to keep them growing healthy and strong. 

      Special Activity Exploration in Room 15

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      One of the learning aims we are exploring this term is building our resilience to changes in routine – this time of year has plenty of them! – as we use the symbol for “special activity” to reassure our learners that the changes are planned and can be something to look forward to.

      We had a celebration of our class achievements at the end of term, with each of our learners choosing photographs to go into a presentation of what they have done.  Everyone took home a certificate and some of our learners were very proud of theirs!  A special mention must also go out to our class member who won the secondary department star of the month for her fabulous signing – well done!

      Since returning from the October holidays we have been as busy as ever!

      We have worked hard on our ASDANs, exploring team work and group work skills.  We worked in teams to build towers, and created a beautiful Halloween collaborative art project.  We had lots of fun decorating our pumpkin for Halloween as well as Halloween themed bucket time activities.

      This week we have had lots of firework related activities – we made cheese straw bonfires in home economics, focused for lots of fireworks activities for bucket time, a cola mentos firework for our ASDAN science (causing a change) and for outdoor education we went out to search for sticks to build our own bonfire before watching fireworks.  As we build our familiarity with seasonal events we also build our resilience to routine variations and our capacity to communicate about them.

      We’re looking forward to lots more “special activity” events this term!

      Taking Care of our Appearance

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      In our life skills lessons we have been working on Personal Care Routines: personal grooming, looking smart, appointments at local services and finally a project.  We chose to tie dye T-Shirts.  We practiced with scrap material and blackberries first.  Then we tie dyed T-shirts.  It was so much fun we decided to dye bags too with the leftover inks.  We then had to wash them all and hang them up to dry.  We were so proud of our efforts we had an impromptu fashion show and paraded around the school showing off our creations.  It was messy, but a lot of fun.