Hub 1 | Christopher Pickering Primary School

Happy Tuesday…

By Jodie Buss21st October 2025

A lovely calm start to our day with some stimulation and regulation through jigsaws! The boys were particularly engaged with these activities this morning and showed deep concentration and stayed with this activity for a prolonged period! They showed persisentence, determination, independence and support to one another as they accomplished their tasks and achievements of completed jigsaws!

Another great activity to keep those fingers and minds busy, promoting fine motor skills and turn taking with others! Sometimes it’s the simple activities which allow for the most learning opportunities…

Autumn Trees!

By Jodie Buss20th October 2025

This afternoon during our ‘curriculum time‘ the children explored Autumnal colours and manipulating paint with their hands and tools! We have been spending a lot of time in our outside cabin looking for signs of Autumn and the changes in the season, exploring the leaves and colours! Today we decided to paint our own Autumn tree, using the colours we had spotted from our nature expeditions!

The children loved creating trunks and branches with a brush, working on their fine motor skills and loved getting their fingers and hands messy for a sensory experience!

More or less!

By Jodie Buss20th October 2025

Here are a few snaps of some our HUB1 children taking part in our Attention Autism Barrell activity! The children enjoy this daily in our morning routine and have really improved in giving good eye contact and made huge progress with their listening and attention skills! The children wait in anticipation for the activities from the Barrell and the session promotes an abundance of opportunity for language and vocabulary development!

Below are some further snaps of our Math’s session looking at ‘more‘ and ‘less‘. We worked on counting out amounts visually and representing these amounts with the correct numeral. We looked at the terms ‘more’ or ‘less’ and the children enjoyed exploring more and less with conkers!

Autumn Forest School!

By Jodie Buss15th October 2025

This afternoon we had several Autumnal activities where we explored pumpkins, made fairy stick wands and tasted yummy hot chocolate!

The children loved exploring inside a pumpkin and discovering lots of seeds and sticky squishy pumpkin mash! This was a great sensory experience and we enjoyed using our fine motor skills to scoop out the pumpkin contents and explore our senses of touch and smell!

In our outdoor forest school we joined some children in Foundation Stage to make and decorate some stick wands! This was lots of fun and got our fingers moving-wrapping and threading ribbon and bits of Autumnal foliage!

We enjoyed chatting to new friends over a hot chocolate and exploring the great outdoors, practicing our balancing skills on the logs and attempting to do this independently!

A lovely afternoon in our forest school garden where the children definitely seem their happiest!

Chocolate Fair Apples!

By Jodie Buss14th October 2025

This afternoon in HUB1 we made our very own fairground chocolate apples, in celebration of Hull Fair week!

The children loved chocolate tasting and watching what happens to the chocolate when it heats in the microwave. We loved stirring the chocolate and exploring it’s texture once it had melted! The children had a go at independently dunking their apples and dipping in sprinkles to create the perfect yummy chocolate apples!

This was a great opportunity for engaging in a sensory activity, listening to the sounds of the microwave and sprinkles and smelling the scrumptious chocolate! It was also a great opportunity for language development and turn-taking, sharing and helping others!

We can’t wait to take them home tonight to have a go at tasting our delicious apples!

Autumn Maths Exploration!

By Jodie Buss14th October 2025

This morning in HUB1 we explored numbers to 10 and 20 working on our number recognition and counting out amounts. We enjoyed exploring autumnal counting objects and counting out amounts matching them to the correct numeral!

We all concentrated on this activity for a prolonged period and enjoyed the outcome!

Getting messy!!!

By Jodie Buss7th October 2025

This week in Hub 1 we have done lots of ‘getting messy activities‘ to encourage our fine and gross motor skills! From painting activities, muddy play, shaving foam squeezing and pumpkin discovering… we have been given lots of opportunities to get our hands moving and really get stuck in with some sensory exploration! Messy play is an extremely important part of our learning and development, enhancing those early sensory exploration skills, alongside fostering creativity and problem solving, promoting emotional regulation and encouraging and supporting language development!

These experiences have led to lots of open ended communication opportunities and encouraging the use of vocabulary and expressing needs and wants! The children have loved joining in with all these activities and had a wonderful afternoon welcoming some parents in to join us in our ‘stay and play‘ session on Monday afternoon!

Crafts in the cabin…

By Jodie Buss22nd September 2025

The children in Hub 1 had a wonderful afternoon exploring our new cabin space and the beautiful garden area outside!

We had great fun getting messy in the mud kitchen, mixing potions with sticks and listening to the wind blow and rustling through the trees! A lovely calm afternoon outside in the fresh air connecting with nature and providing an opportunity for some great balancing skills on the logs!

Inside the cabin we enjoyed making some paper faces and decorating them with eyes, ears, nose, mouth and hair, exploring different faces as part of our ‘Magical Me’ topic! A great opportunity for some fine motor skill practice and lots of vocabulary and communication/ talking points!