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We’ve been as busy as ever in Room 10, with core focuses on sensory regulation and communication throughout our daily routines.  We’ve been exploring organising activities as part of a sensory circuit, and did a brilliant job engaging with tasks which required more planning and thought to complete.  Alongside our immersive communication approach with our existing AAC, we’ve also recently been using the Sounding Board app more – this has been great for supporting engagement and has enabled more opportunities to share pupil voice.  We’ve also been loving free movement and dance activities, including dance with specialist Katie and class discos, giving sensory regulation opportunities through movement breaks as well as a brilliant means to build relationships with those around us.

We’ve been continuing our Book Study with the Supertato series, which has provided lots of fabulously fun and messy opportunities to engage with the plots – we’ve had mashed potato sensory play, frozen pea sensory play for “Supertato: Veggies Assemble” (oh, the smell!), which alongside being fab to run our hands through we also discovered made for a slippery slide to walk through!  For “Supertato: Carnival Catastro-Pea” we had paint messy play, with paper down across the whole classroom floor – however, aside from a few exceptions, we were impressed how reserved everyone was for this!

Any Room 10 families wanting to can find out more about any of what we have been up to on our Google Classroom.

All of these have been fab opportunities to link back to our communication aims too – making choices, sharing likes and dislikes, requesting more and naming what we can see around us.  The progress with speech and AAC use has been phenomenal, and we look forward to continuing to build on this in the new term.

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Pretend play makes up a very important part of our class activities. It allows our group to play different roles and test our pupils’ reactions and responses to different situations. Playing shop is great for this type of activity-based learning.

Our pupils had as much fun setting up the shop as they did playing shop, and they learned an awful lot too!

Children had fun being supported writing the main shop sign, collecting things that can be ‘sold’ in the shop.

We had a little play-till for our shop and the kids loved punching in numbers and calling out the prices of things. They priced things with labels and practised writing numbers too. They started to understand how price and value differ from item to item.

We used play money giving coins (£1 and £2) and notes (£5 and £10) in exchange for items that they ‘bought’ from the shop. This was a great way to introduce the concept of money and trade.

Of course, every shop needs to be in good order if the customers are going to be able to find things! Perhaps all the food should go on one shelf and toiletries on another. Therefore, we got some great plastic food items like fruits and vegetables that helped the children to play and identify, or sort, different items.

Next step for our pupils is to use some real fruit and veg, bread and cans to get ready them to ‘buy’ themselves a healthy snack/lunch.

In Room 8 we know the value of pretend play, and encourage the fun times and learning experiences that activity-based play can bring. So, you could help us upcycling some household items and collecting some baskets and paper shopping bags for our learner’s very own shop. Thank you in advance.