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 really keen to tell me all about the presents they’ve received over Christmas and the holiday fun they’ve enjoyed but it wasn’t too long before we were all 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 important developments. As regular followers of the blog will know, we’re building an extension at the back of the school. Initially this was a single storey building to house our Autism Base, however since then we secured further funding to add a second storey that will provide four extra classrooms. This is a much needed addition to our premises as it will help us to accommodate the growing numbers of pupils joining our school. We anticipate that building work will be completed by Easter which will allow us to begin moving into the building over the summer term ready for the start of the new year in September. In the meantime, we have been eagerly awaiting our Ofsted report following our inspection at the beginning of December. I’m pleased to say that we have been contacted by Ofsted today so I’m really looking forward to sharing it with you in the next week or two.

Another of our Year 7 classes would like to introduce themselves this week, here are 7LHA to get the year off to a flying start..

This week, 7LHA have had an extremely busy week but it has also been lots of fun! After catching up with each other after the Christmas break, we were straight back into our timetable.

On Monday, we arrived at our English lesson to find Mrs Holland’s classroom was cordoned off with warning signs! We went in cautiously and found that there was a strange, green egg there! We put on our lab coats and goggles and examined the egg and tried to guess what strange or magical creature could be inside. We then researched which animals hatch from eggs and wrote newspaper headlines to let everyone know what had happened.

On Tuesday, in ICT, we sat our E-Safety tests. For the past term we have been learning about how to keep safe online with Mrs Grogan and we have been working hard, revising everything we have talked about..

Wednesday was a very exciting and fun day. Along with the rest of Year 7, we headed out on the school buses to Oldham Coliseum to watch the Jack and the Beanstalk pantomime. The show was absolutely fantastic. We loved the characters, the fancy costumes and the sets. Everything was so colourful and the actors were amazing. We had so much fun and laughed, sang and danced all the way through the show! Oh yes we did!!!! Every pupil made the staff so proud with their exceptional behaviour and everyone had a fantastic day..

On Thursday, we had a fantastic cooking lesson with Mrs Hickman. The focus of the lesson was using cooking equipment correctly and safely which included filling, boiling and pouring the kettle and boiling water on the hob in a pan..

We also opened cans using a can opener..

..and used a sieve to strain the pasta..

This week, the knife skills we practised were chopping and slicing. We prepared a selection of vegetables into small sized pieces..

Putting all of our skills together, we were able produce a lovely tuna pasta dish, which we sampled and thought was delicious!

In Music, with Mr Challinor, we have started to learn to recognise riffs in music. We are trying to not only recognise where the riffs appear but also which instruments are used in various popular songs. We are learning to play riffs on different instruments including using Garage Band on our iPads to access electric guitars and smart pianos..

In Art we enjoyed using watercolours to create some beautiful rainbow skies..

We have had a great week, getting back into our class routine, going out into the community, using our imaginations and learning new skills. We are so excited about what else this new term will bring!

I hope you have a good week,

Gavin

Click here for this week’s news from Graham

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

You can find my previous blog posts here