You may remember that last week Mr Lyons was on tenterhooks waiting for the news that his wife had gone into labour. We can tell you that he’s finally had that all important call and we hope to be able to bring you more news soon!

In the meantime, we have a picture special from our Interactive Bases to share with you this week..

In IB2, we have been focusing on our ‘Learning for life’ skills this term and have been trying lots of new activities. We have been developing our communication skills by working on making choices with the help of photos and symbols, expressing our feelings through facial gestures, vocalisations and body language whilst looking in the mirror, greeting people appropriately during our morning routine and socialising when we are out in the community..

Both IB groups are streamed for Maths and English and our topic this term is ‘Witches and Wizards.’ Miss Carter’s group have been looking at the story of ‘Webster Witch’s Ugly Potion’. Webster Witch makes a potion to transform you from being ugly to beautiful by adding lots of different and exciting ingredients – lots of ideas for Maths there!

Every Monday in English we read the story and explore all the different sensory stimuli that are added to the potion, this includes mushy peas, smelly socks, parmesan cheese and smelly mud that stinks of poo!! We have made mud pictures, exploded bubble bombs, taken selfies transforming our faces into witches, made broccoli feet florets and stained glass window cauldrons..

In English Miss Ward’s group have been working on making a sensory story to ‘Room on the Broom’ and have explored fluffy feathers, sticky treacle, yukky slime and many more to make our sensory props. We have been singing rhyming songs about witches and wizards whilst encouraging eye contact, audio and visual tracking and having lots and lots of fun in the process! In Maths we have been using HelpKidzLearn to work on number recognition and encourage independent use of the touchscreen and counting ingredients to make a potion including worms, spiders, slime, rats, bones and bats..

In cooking Miss Ward’s group have focused on fine and gross motor skills, eye tracking and following instructions with support from class staff. We have really enjoyed our cooking lessons and our favourite recipes have been witches hat cupcakes, HufflePuff pizza puffs, pumpkin, ginger cake and star shaped shortbread..

Cooking is topic related in Miss Carter’s group too and (you may want to look away now!) we have made bogey popcorn, Mississippi mud pie, earwax cupcakes, vegetable curry, witches bread fingers and Webster’s eggy flan and pea and ricotta pesto..

Outdoor Ed takes places on a Thursday and Mr Hollinsworth takes us to lots of places to explore our senses. Nature crafts has been a popular activity where we have been outdoors and enjoyed making pictures with the leaves and sticks we have collected..

During our morning routine, an important part of the day where we settle into class, we have been looking at different ways to say Hello, the daily weather with a song and brushing our teeth..

We have been looking at Italy in our Geography lessons with Miss Ward and have made paper pizzas, flags and have started to paint our own Leaning Tower of Pisa whilst listening to some traditional Italian music..

As well as all these fun lessons, we have loved our music sessions, our Sherbourne sessions and, of course, swimming..

As part of our community access, Friday mornings see a big group of us from both the school and Learning Centre IB classes head to Alexandra Park for Ability Wheelz which is GREAT FUN!!

Both IB classes enjoyed spending time with each other for our Halloween party when we made lots of different things including monster cookies, salt dough decorations, bat pictures and treacle cake..

..and our Children in Need themed day..

We hope you have enjoyed finding out more about our Interactive Bases and we look forward to sharing more of our work with you next term!

Mrs Fennelley’s class had an exciting morning on Thursday when they were invited to join the Kestrels class at Kingfisher School to learn all about balance by participating in some amazing races and a fantastic obstacle course..

The children also got a chance to meet Fred The Red who presented them with a certificate from the Manchester United Foundation for all their hard work!

There are more pictures from our friends at Kingfisher here – thank you very much for inviting us!

We have now counted up the donations made for Children in Need and are very pleased to announce we raised a total of £267.71 last Friday. Of that, an incredible £114.16 came from the cake sale organised by Miss Silvester’s class..

 

Well done everyone!

We hope you enjoy your week and we promise to bring you news from Mr Lyons as soon as we get it!

You can find Dawn’s blog for the Learning Centre here

For news on our Key Stage 5 pathway groups at Medtia Square please click here

Click here to read this week’s news from Graham

You can find Mr Lyons’ previous blog posts here