Hello and Happy New Year. It was great to welcome back so many smiling faces, both pupils and staff alike, for a new term here at New Bridge. The pupils were keen to tell me all about the presents they’ve received over Christmas; we’ve had everything from new trainers, to Call of Duty, to motorbikes and even surprise trips abroad. However, it wasn’t long before we were back down to the business of learning. It’s been a relatively quiet week as we all settled back into school life and lessons got underway so I’ll just keep it brief this week other than to share with you a quick update on a couple of big projects happening at the moment.

As regular followers of the blog will know, we’re building an extension at the back of the school to house our Autism Base. Builders were finally on site before Christmas as the initial site setup took place and the compound for housing the team working on the building was created. Work has progressed this week and diggers are currently working on the foundations. The plan is for the building to be completed and ready to be used by September of this year, ready for the start of the new academic year.

Back in school itself, we are preparing for the launch of our iPad project which will see every pupil and member of the teaching team issued with an iPad. We’ve recently reviewed our vision for the project and our aims are:

• Technology will enhance the learning experience and support each child to reach their aspirational destination.
• Teachers will use technology to streamline the process of assessment for learning to support pupil progress.
• Technology will support collaboration and communication within our learning community.
• We will sustain the impact of technology through a continuous cycle of innovation.

We intend to provide the teaching team with iPads and training this term with a view to introducing them to pupils later in the year. In order to give parents and carers an understanding of the aims of the project and how we intend to use the iPads to support the outcomes for our pupils, we will be hosting a parent information event. I will post further details of the event here once we have confirmed details.

Mr Goup has taken pictures in his Maths lessons to show us some of the work the pupils have been doing. They have used numicon to make shapes with a given perimeter..

..and concrete manipulatives to aid their subtraction and addition work..

They have also been using Hegarty Maths on the iPads to practise exam style questions..

You may remember that before Christmas our Activ8 pathway chose to donate their time to the less fortunate people on the streets of Manchester. The young people on the pathway created a number of care packages..

..which they then spent the day distributing to people across Manchester City Centre. We now have a couple of pictures of them in action..

Letters have gone home with details of our February Holiday Club, so please remember to return the forms by Friday 18th January if you would like to book a place for your child. If you need another copy of the letter or have any questions, please let us know.

See you next week.

Gavin

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 my previous blog posts here