In the past few blogs I‘ve focused on our new school year and our new pupils, this week I’m focusing on more new aspects of New Bridge School life. All of our families will now have received an invitation to register for our new ‘Parent Connect’ app. From now on, we will be using this app as our primary method of communication with families. It contains useful links to our brand-new site specific social media page, our website, these weekly blogs, our school calendar and ParentPay. Over the next few weeks our families will also hear from their child’s teachers who will begin to use the app to update them on their child’s learning and experiences here at school. Many of our families have registered and are using the app already so if you’re yet to do so, please register and you’ll be able to access all the benefits it brings with it. If you have any questions or require any support around using the app, please do not hesitate to get in touch with us.

Another new addition is our brand new Facebook page. Up until now we have shared the New Bridge Group Facebook page with the other schools in our Trust. Now we have our very own! To help us keep you up to date with everything that is going on in school please ‘Follow’ and ‘Like’ our page @NewBridgeSchoolOldham. You can find us here.

Now that we’re all settling back into school, I’m reintroducing the weekly focus on different classes across the school. Each week we’ll be catching up with a different class to find out what they’ve been learning about. This week our focus is in our Autism Base. Miss Bingley gives us a peek into how her class have been settling in:

Welcome to AB2! We are now settled back into school, in our new building, and we are enjoying our amazing outside space that we have. Over the past three weeks we have been building relationships with our peers and support staff through lots of different activities as a group. We have been sharing some fun and exciting learning together and enjoying having fun.

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In AB2 we start every day with our morning routine; welcoming everyone back into school and going through the day, date and month. We then enjoy a sensory diet which allows us to gain the sensory input we need to help us get into a ‘just right’ state so that we are able to learn and contribute in our learning sessions more effectively.

Alongside this, we have enjoyed some brilliant work in English, focusing on letter recognition and taking turns within a group..

We have also enjoyed our sensory Maths lesson using our number recognition skills on sensory fish and matching them with the correct number of objects..

During the past few weeks we have thoroughly enjoyed all our different lessons. We have enjoyed our Science lessons learning about our bodies. In Geography we have been looking at where we live and who we live with. In ICT we have been working on cause and effect activities and then we have also enjoyed living skills where we have been working hard on keeping ourselves and our environment clean, and learning all about the different types of weather using our sensory bottles..

We have had lots of water exploration and our sensory story linking to this term’s book ‘What makes me a ME!’, uses different recorded buttons, a lava lamp, shells, a tyre and other sensory items to bring our story to life.  

Focusing on our concentration and participation skills has been an important part of our lessons and through the use of our Attention Autism sessions over the past few weeks, we have made great progress and these sessions have proved to be amazing. We have loved the suspense of waiting for what Miss Bingley will show us next..

In AB2 working on our assessment of learning has been really important, being able to recognise if we needed help or if we could do the work independently. This has proven a great way for us all to participate in what we are learning and what support we need to learn to the best of our ability.

Overall we have had an amazing start to the term and we can’t wait to see what the rest of this term has to bring!

Until next week, take care, stay safe.

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 New Bridge College please click here

You can find Gavin’s previous blog posts here