Health and Wellbeing in Room 17

In Room 17, we have been thinking about our personal health as part of our SQAs. We have been participating in different activities, such as relaxation, yoga, body awareness, and using our different pieces of equipment. We have been enjoying trying and participating in the different activities, which help us to feel better about ourselves.

Exploring Food In Room 17

Since returning from the summer holidays, Room 17 have enjoyed settling into our classroom and making some new friends. We have particularly enjoyed exploring some different food textures and making some beautiful artwork with them. This has included using some homegrown tatties from our garden to make prints, and cauliflower heads as effective prints for leaves for an autumnal picture.

2023 Leavers

Our Secondary Awards and Leavers Ceremony was held in school on Wednesday. Congratulations to all of the Award winners and thanks to the families that joined our celebration.

Today we bid a final goodbye to another fantastic group of young people who have all made huge progress over their years in Orchard Brae. It was an emotional day all round as we celebrated their success and wished them well.

Thanks to Nadine of Elm Music Therapy for making our Leavers video this year:

To our leavers, it’s been an honour and privilege to work with you all and we wish you all every success in the next stage of life. We will miss you all!

Working with Assistive Technologies in Room 17

As part of our SQA, ‘Working with Assistive Technologies’, Room 17 have been exploring lots of different ways of using assistive technologies to give us more independence whilst carrying out different activities, and making our learning fun. We have enjoyed using switch buttons for musical activities, and playing with different toys. We have also used different switches for small appliances, such as the popcorn maker, and the hand blender which we tried to carve different pumpkins with (it’s harder than it looks!).  We even used a switch for operating a hair dryer to paint with  – that was good fun! 

Happy New Year from Room 17

Happy New Year! We hope all our family and friends had a lovely holiday! 

Before the holidays, Room 17 had lots of festive fun. We decorated our classroom, made some fun crafts to share with you at home, and played some games (it didn’t get competitive at all – promise!), and made some reindeer food and hot chocolate cones to sell at the school fayre. Phew, it was busy! We are looking forward to seeing what 2023 has to offer!

Like Robin Hood in Room 17

Room 17 have been practicing their archery skills.  Some of us were better at it than others but we all tried really hard and had lots of fun. We thought it was great fun to knock down the castle with our arrows.  We also enjoyed target practice with lights – when we hit the target there were some sensory lights came on in our classroom.

Bendrigg 2022

Last week, pupils from Room 17, 18 and Howes Hoose embarked on our first trip to the Bendrigg Centre since 2019!

Pupils took part in a range of activities- Sensory Swing, Zip Line, Climbing, Canoeing, Caving, Archery and Biking. Thankfully there was a huge amount of food available to keep us well fed!

As you can see from the photos, all of our pupils worked incredibly hard and pushed themselves to try new things. We heard the words ‘I did it!’ and ‘keep going’ over and over again and the smiles on faces show exactly what it meant.

A huge thank you goes to the Bendrigg Trust for looking after us for the week and also to the Friends of Orchard Brae for supporting us with funding for the trip. We had a wonderful time and are already looking forward to next year!

Room 17 Art Gallery Visit

Room 17 had a very exciting visit to the Art Gallery.  One of our class was in an exhibition celebrating 150 years of Voluntary Service Aberdeen (VSA).  It was really exciting to see a video with Waleed and his family projected on to a huge wall in the Art Gallery. We all enjoyed our bus outing and seeing our friend in his starring role.